9

The Legacy

In the name of God, Amen. I Marye by the Grace of God Quene of England, Spayne, France, both Sicelles, Jerusalem and Ireland, Defender of the Faythe, Archduchesse of Austriche, Duchesse of Burgundy, Millayne and Brabant, Countess of Hapsburg, Flanders and Tyroll, and lawful wife to the most noble and virtuous Prince Philippe, by the same Grace of God Kynge of the said Realms and Domynions of England, Etc.

Thinking myself to be with child in lawful marriage between my said dearly beloved husband and Lord, altho’ I be at this present (thankes be unto Almighty God) otherwise in good helthe, yet foreseeing the great danger which by God’s ordynance remaine to all whomen in ther travel [travail, labour of childbirth], have thought good, both for discharge of my conscience and continewance of good order within my Realmes and Domynions to declare my last will and testament …

 

THEY WERE GRAND titles for a sad, lonely woman who was to face death knowing that she had failed in everything she had set out to do.

The will told its own story. There are affectionate references to ‘my most dere and well-beloved mother, Quene Kateryn’, whose body she asked to be brought from Peterborough to rest near her own, and only one to her father, asking that his debts be paid. She asked for Masses to be said for her soul, that of her mother and of their progenitors, and of Philip when he should die. Generous bequests were made to the religious houses she had re-founded: to the orders of the Carthusian monks and the Brigittine nuns at Syon and Sheen, to the Observant Friars at Greenwich and Southampton, to the monastery of Westminster, to the brothers at the Savoy Hospital, and to the black friars at St Bartholomew in Smithfield. A hospital was to be established in her name for poor, elderly soldiers, especially those injured ‘in the warres and servys of this Realme’. Reflecting her interest in learning, money was left ‘to the relefe of the pore scholars’ at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge.

She asked that ‘my saide most dearest lorde and husbande’ keep the jewel the Emperor had sent her on their betrothal and ‘also one other table dyamonde whiche his Majesty sent unto me … and the Coler of golde set with nyne diamonds, the whiche his Majestye gave me the Epiphanie after our Maryage, also the rubie now sett in a golde ryng which his Highnesses sent me by the Cont of Feria’. Many bequests were made to her attendants and she did not forget the ordinary servants.

The will was signed on 30 March 1558, when Mary fondly imagined a second time that she was pregnant. Pathetically, she refers to ‘the Issewe of my bodye that shall succeed me in the Imperiall Crowne of this Realme’. On 28 October 1558, ‘fealynge myself presently sicke and weake in bodye’, she added a codicil. By this time, she had to admit that there was unlikely to be a child: ‘Forasmuch as God hath hitherto sent me no frewte nor heire of my bodye, yt ys onlye in his most devyne providence whether I shall have onny or noo.’

She had only three weeks left to live. Much against her personal desire, but at the insistence of Philip, she knew now that the bastard Elizabeth, daughter of the whore Anne Boleyn who had ruined her mother’s life and her own, would succeed her. The shameless girl seemed to have bewitched Philip and perhaps, Mary would have reflected sadly, he would marry her after she was gone. ‘Yf yt shall please Almighty God to call me to his mercye owte of this transitory lyfe without issew and heire of my bodye lawfully begotten,’ she continued, the crown would go to ‘my next heire and Successour, by the Laws and Statutes of this Realme’.

She could not quite bring herself to name Elizabeth, the younger sister to whom she would always be compared so unfavourably, but in a final act of generosity she did beseech Philip, for the sake of the love she had borne him and the old friendship between England and the Low Countries, to take a special care of the realm: ‘that yt may please his Majesty to shew himself as a Father in his care, as a Brother or member of this Realme in his love and favour, and as a most assured and undowted frend in his power and strengthe to my said heire and Successour, and to this my Country and the Subjects of the same’.

In October 1558 Mary had fallen victim to the influenza epidemic. No attempt had been made to go into quarantine – a precaution her father had always followed most assiduously. She seemed to rally, but then in November she deteriorated again. Mary might well have been suffering from an ovarian cyst, since she was in terrible pain, or even cancer of the uterus, but it was the influenza that undermined her ebbing strength and probably killed her. A few days prior to her death, she had sent her lady-in-waiting, Jane Dormer, to Hatfield, charged with handing over a case of her precious jewels to Elizabeth, and with asking for her assurance that she would continue to maintain the Catholic faith. Elizabeth returned an ambiguous answer.

Mary, meanwhile, drifted in and out of consciousness, at one point telling her attendants that she was experiencing visions of the heavenly joy that awaited her, seeing ‘many little children like angels playing before her, singing pleasing notes, giving her more than earthly comfort’. At dawn on 17 November 1558, in pain but fully alert and able to voice the responses, she heard Mass in her chamber. The presiding doctor recalled that she slipped away quietly, almost imperceptibly, but Jane Dormer, writing years later, maintained that the Catholic Queen had died at the climax of the Mass, the elevation of the Host.

A few hours later, across the river at Lambeth Palace, Cardinal Pole died of influenza, having heard of the death of his cousin, whose life had been so entangled with his own. Ironically, the Pope had withdrawn Pole’s legatine powers, after a quarrel with Philip, and demanded his return to Rome to answer charges of heresy. His life ended in frustration and failure, just as Mary’s did.

When news of Mary’s death reached Philip in Brussels, he paused in the letter he was writing. He had known she was mortally ill, but he had excused himself from being there through pressure of business. She had been too ill to read the letter he sent her. He picked up his quill and continued phlegmatically: ‘The Calais question cannot be settled so soon, now that the Queen, my wife, is dead. May God have received her in His glory! I felt a reasonable regret for her death. I shall miss her, even on this account.’

*   *   *

The image posterity has of Mary is of a woman subservient to her husband, who was so in his thrall that she went to war for his sake and lost Calais, England’s last possession in France. The truth is more complex. For all her professions of love and devotion and of needing Philip, Mary was never prepared to step aside and let him take over in her realm. She wanted him, but on her own terms.

If Mary was really determined about something, no amount of opposition would deter her. Yet she often flouted Philip’s will. Before he left in August 1555, he complained that he had been excluded from the government in a way ‘unbecoming to his dignity’ and threatened ‘never to return without sharing the government with her’. He sought a coronation in England, seeing it as the only way to gain any authority in the kingdom, or interest in it after her death. Mary replied to his constant pleas with excuses, saying that there was strenuous opposition she could not overcome in his absence. Parliament would never consent. They might give him the future shadow of a crown in the shape of a regent’s rights, if he and Mary had a child, but were unwilling to give him its present substance for fear he might use it as an excuse to drag England into war with France.

Mary was trying to hold out the possibility of a coronation as an inducement to get him to return, while Philip expressed his unwillingness to do so without a guarantee. He would not contemplate the loss to his dignity of returning and then being refused.

Throughout 1556 Mary was more than ever incapable of giving the lead to her Council, left somewhat rudderless after the death of Gardiner. The long strain of ill health and emotional frustration were taking their toll. When one of Philip’s emissaries came in July to say that Philip would be in England within six weeks she lost her temper. ‘It was nothing but mere promises,’ she shouted, with a resentment born of despair. Later, as rumours of Philip’s womanizing filtered back to Mary’s ears, the mischievous French ambassador, Gilles de Noailles, who had replaced his brother Antoine, reported that he had heard from some of her attendants ‘that she has been seen scratching the portraits of her husband the King of Spain which she keeps in her rooms’. She would spend hours sitting on cushions on the floor of her bedchamber, moaning, and banging her head against the wall.

With Philip’s departure, court life once more relapsed into the dull monotony only to be expected when the sovereign was an unhappy, middle-aged woman of uncertain health. Unlike her father or sister, Mary rarely went on progress. Even when she was not indisposed, she hesitated to travel far from her own palaces, conscious of the fact that a royal visit would lay an unnecessary burden on her subjects at a time of severe hardship.

Yet we catch glimpses of Mary at court conscientiously carrying out her ceremonial duties as queen. She touched for the Evil, rubbing her fingers on the swollen glands of the afflicted, just as her sainted forebear, King Edward the Confessor, had done. On Maundy Thursday she washed the feet of the poor and gave alms and hospitality, in memory of the Last Supper when Christ washed the feet of his disciples and of His commandment to them to love one another. As the choir chanted the Miserere and other psalms, Mary withdrew to change out of the gown she was wearing, one of fine purple cloth lined with marten’s fur and sleeves that swept the ground, returning to give it to the oldest and poorest of the women.

By September 1556 Philip had still not returned to her and Mary was reduced to writing a pleading letter to her father-in-law, who was on the verge of retiring to a monastery in Spain, having ceded the Spanish crown to Philip. England had fallen into a deplorable state, she told him. ‘I am not moved by my personal desire for his presence, although I confess I do unspeakably long to have him here, but by care for this kingdom.’ The country needed a strong hand if it was not to fall into chaos.

When Philip did return in March 1557, the reason was blatantly obvious: it was to embroil England in his ongoing war with France. The worst fears of those who had opposed the Queen’s foreign marriage were being realized. It seemed that despite the legislation designed to counteract it – the marriage treaty – a queen had no more power than any other woman to withstand a husband’s pressure.

The Emperor’s adviser, the Bishop of Arras, wrote confidently to Philip the following month that he trusted England would be moved to declare war on France by ‘the Queen’s desire to please you in every way’. Hitherto Mary had resisted all Philip’s entreaties to declare war, but now he told her categorically that unless she persuaded the Council, she would never see him again. Still passionately in love with him, she was reduced to summoning individual counsellors to her room and threatening them with dismissal if they did not do what she asked. They were prepared to offer Philip money and troops, but stopped short of a declaration of war. He would accept nothing less. In the end, it was the Protestant exile Thomas Stafford’s French-sponsored attack on the east coast at Scarborough that thrust England into war.

The loss of Calais and Guisnes, the last of Edward III’s conquests in France, was seen as a national humiliation. The chronic financial insolvency Mary had inherited from her predecessors meant that the string of forts in the Pale of Calais was run down; she was only too aware of this, while at the same time she was to work tirelessly to raise the money and men Philip demanded. The French took the opportunity to strike during the winter when the garrison was poorly manned and when weather in the Channel would prevent reinforcements being sent from England. It was a sure bet that the English garrison would be drunk over New Year, when the attack took place. Nevertheless, the English felt profoundly let down by Philip, whose duty as king was to provide military assistance to his wife.

Mary would have found some solace in the words of her far more capable cousin, Mary of Hungary, Regent of the Netherlands: ‘A woman is never feared or respected as a man is, whatever her rank … in times of war … it is entirely impossible for a woman to govern satisfactorily. All she can do is shoulder the responsibility for the mistakes committed by others.’

Mary is said to have confided to Susan Clarencieux in the last months of her life that she had a secret sorrow which oppressed her. Was it the King’s absence? Clarencieux asked, probably thinking of his philandering. ‘Not that only,’ Mary answered, ‘but when I am dead and opened, you shall find Calais lying in my heart.’ The story may be apocryphal.

Philip’s brief visit triggered off Mary’s second phantom pregnancy. She was now forty-one years old. Fearing that she might be mistaken again, she kept the knowledge to herself for several months. In January 1558, however, Philip wrote to Cardinal Pole, thanking him for his letters ‘in which you send me news of the pregnancy of the Queen, my beloved wife, which has given me greater joy than I can express to you, as it is the one thing in the world I have most desired and which is of the greatest importance for the cause of religion and the welfare of the realm’.

Two months later, Philip’s envoy, Count Feria, revealed that the Queen’s confinement was expected in March: ‘The one thing that matters to her is that your Majesty should come hither, and it seems to me she is making herself believe that she is with child, although she does not own up to it.’ It was not until May that Feria was able to report that she ‘now realized that her pregnancy has come to nothing’. Again, she was suffering from profound melancholy, but ‘has taken patiently your Majesty’s decision not to come for the present’.

As there would clearly be no heir, Philip’s plan was to keep England in the Habsburg camp by marrying Elizabeth to Emmanuel Philibert, Duke of Savoy, who would be compensated with England for ceding what remained of his lands to Philip. For once, the two sisters were united in their opposition, although for different reasons. Mary was still having trouble coming to terms with the idea of Elizabeth succeeding her, while Elizabeth naturally had no intention of being her brother-in-law’s pawn. Mary consistently opposed Philip’s wishes on this question. Resentful of the pressure he was putting her under, she wrote him an angry letter, but decided against sending it. Instead, she snatched the opportunity to suggest he come to England so that they could discuss it properly.

If Mary had succeeded in bearing a child, there is reason to believe that England would have remained Catholic, benefiting from the Counter-Reformation which was under way in Europe. Cardinal Pole’s reforms within the Church were slow, but they would eventually have had a positive result. Twenty years of schism and damage to the structure and the finances of the Church and a whole generation grown up in ignorance of its doctrine could not be undone in three or four years. It would take time to rebuild and train the priesthood. The latent strength of Catholicism in England at the end of Mary’s reign can be gauged by how long and how difficult it was for her successor to eradicate it.

As it turned out, Mary’s life and reign ended in sterility. She has been held responsible for putting the cause of Catholicism in England back 300 to 400 years. For all her mistakes, she cannot be blamed for prejudices which were inflamed by events that occurred after her death. Her reputation suffered retrospectively through growing anti-Spanish sentiment and hostility to Philip, who was to send the Armada against England thirty years after her death. In the context of the religious wars that afflicted France, the Netherlands and Germany in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which were far more savage and claimed thousands of victims, the nearly 400 Protestants who died for their beliefs during Mary’s reign in England were comparatively few. Their significance was magnified out of all proportion afterwards.

History is written by the victors. Mary’s reputation has suffered almost irreparable damage owing to John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, popularly known as the Book of Martyrs, which became an anti-Catholic propaganda tool in the course of Elizabeth’s reign. It is hard to judge the Marian persecution dispassionately because of the insidious power of this book. As one of 800 Protestant refugees who fled the country at the outset of Mary’s reign, Foxe had begun by publishing at Strasbourg a book about the early Christian martyrs and the Lollards and Protestants in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries who had suffered for their faith. Returning to England at Elizabeth’s accession, undeterred by her placatory religious policy, he toured the country gathering material about those who had been burned under Mary, speaking to spectators and friends of the victims. He also took copies of the letters they had written and of the official records of their interrogations in the bishops’ registers.

The book does not wilfully warp the truth, but it is skewed nevertheless by his often highly selective choice of material. ‘Be of good comfort, Master Ridley and play the man. We shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.’ Did Latimer actually utter these heroic words? They might have been taken down by his servant, who later gathered Latimer’s sermons together for publication, but we do not know. The quotation was not in the 1563 edition and one may legitimately question the veracity of an uncorroborated speech that entered the printed record fifteen years after the event. But it made good copy.

A battery of anecdotes, autobiographical memoirs, legal examinations, sermons, ballads, beast fables, letters, romanticized adventure narratives like the story of the hair’s-breadth escape of the young Duchess of Suffolk, or the emotive description of Lady Jane Grey’s execution, and, above all, of the final moments of Cranmer, Ridley and Latimer, and also of ordinary people, exclusively dedicated to one subject and taken out of context, obviously makes an overwhelming impression.

This monster edition, amounting to 1,721 pages, complete with propagandist woodcuts depicting the Marian bishops as beasts with their victims as slaughtered lambs piled at their feet, was published in 1563 and dedicated to the ‘most Christian and renowned princess, Queen Elizabeth’. It celebrates the transition from ‘the cruel practices and horrible persecutions of Queen Mary’s reign’ to that of her merciful and clement successor. Foxe conveniently overlooks the fact that Mary had stuck firmly to her religious principles during Edward’s reign, whereas Protestant Elizabeth had conformed during her sister’s reign.

A subsequent edition, including additional feedback he had received as a result of the previous one and judiciously omitting the excesses of Henry VIII, was published in 1570 and could not have been better timed. The international situation had deteriorated and Elizabeth and Philip were on a collision course. Mary, Queen of Scots, whom the Catholics recognized as the true heir to the English throne, was a prisoner in England. A papal bull excommunicated the heretic Queen, Elizabeth, and gave free licence to assassinate her. The gloves were off. In a calculated bid to arouse fear and hatred of Rome, the Pope and Catholics in the minds of the English people, Elizabeth’s government was now prepared to give its official support to the Book of Martyrs.

Now the book was regarded as an expression of the national faith second in authority only to the Bible and as an unanswerable defence of England’s ideological position in the contemporary struggle for national independence and power. It gave life to a body of legend which seemed to explain how and why England’s current predicament had come about and to justify whatever course the Queen and the nation might take in its own defence and for the accomplishment of its destiny. The book was placed in every cathedral and many parish churches, for the people to read and absorb. A copy was placed on every ship, in conflict with the Spanish on the high seas and in the New World and, above all, on the ships that defeated the Spanish Armada in 1588. It was said to be as effective as Drake’s drum.

It was reprinted in 1598 and four times during the seventeenth century. New editions appeared in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and in the United States in the twentieth century. The people were continuously reminded of what would happen if England was ever again ruled by a Catholic sovereign. By the seventeenth century, a period of intense religious conflict and civil war, the Protestants were calling Mary ‘Bloody Mary’, a term that Foxe did not specifically use, although the 1563 edition refers to the ‘horrible and bloudy time of Quene Mary’.

It was certainly not a term that would have been used or approved by Elizabeth, who, whatever her private feelings about her sister, began her reign with a proclamation stating that it had pleased God to vest the crown in her ‘by calling to his mercy out of this mortal life, to our great grief, our dearest sister of noble memory’, the late Queen Mary. Mary was an anointed queen and Elizabeth would tolerate no criticism of her.

The legacy of childless queens was unease. Women’s rule created a feeling of insecurity, especially at a time of religious upheaval. Everything that had brought comfort in previous centuries – the age-old traditions of the Church, which embraced kings, nobles and commoners in the whole body of Christendom from the cradle to the grave and beyond – was being stripped away, just as the familiar figure of the King was being replaced by a woman. It was no coincidence that when the people felt most insecure, rumours abounded that the King had returned. Queen Mary had failed to produce a male heir, but there were ‘sightings’ of Edward VI, who was supposed to have survived. It did not help that the last years of Mary’s brief reign were also dogged by bad weather, failed harvests and epidemics.

The Protestant exile John Knox’s polemic, The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, was a vicious attack on female rule, specifically Catholic female rule. It was a piece of sectarian political opportunism and Mary Tudor was one of his prime targets. ‘It is a thinge most repugnant in nature that women rule and governe over men,’ he expostulated, continuing: ‘… that a woman promoted to sit in the seate of God, that is, to teache, to judge or to reigne above man, is a monster in nature, contumelie to God, and a thing most repugnant to his will and ordinance.’

To Knox, Mary Tudor was just another Jezebel, Ahab’s wife who tried to annihilate the preachers of God’s word and ended her life wretchedly. She was a bastard and a vicious tyrant, ‘unworthy by reason of her bloody tyranny of the name of a woman’. Her crimes were so monstrous that even the base name of woman was too good for her.

Knox’s timing was unfortunate, since the book was published at Geneva in 1558, just as a Protestant queen was about to mount the English throne, and she sent him off with a flea in his ear for his presumption in criticizing queenship and her sex.

Female monarchy was regarded as a deviation from the ‘natural’ or proper order of things, in which a king sat on the throne and male supremacy was the social norm. Not that Mary or Elizabeth intended to do anything to change the lot of other women. As queens, they were set apart from the rest, chosen by God for His special purpose, divinely inspired. And yet Mary proved all too human, a prey to her unstable emotions and ill health, too conditioned by the bitterness of the past. The traditional preserves of a woman were marriage and childbirth, but they also made a queen regnant vulnerable. Mary failed at both.

Welcomed on a wave of good will, she squandered the people’s love, because she was not sensitive enough to the popular mood, ignoring the vociferously expressed opposition to her choice of husband and the revulsion felt at the continuing persecution of Protestants. Her lifelong habit of dependence on foreign relatives raised the question of her national loyalty. To be the first queen regnant was not easy, especially in a time of religious turmoil. Her successor watched and learned. She noted the difficulty of being a queen and a wife and vowed not to commit the same mistakes.

Mary deserves sympathy and understanding, but, ultimately, she was ordinary, too ordinary to transcend the prejudice against female rule and prove it wrong.