XXX

Here is my hands,

My dere lover Englande.

I am thine with both mind and hart;

For ever to endure,

Thou maiest be sure,

Untill death us two do depart.

A traveler to England in Mary’s reign described the country as “a long, narrow gut of land, situated in the great sea at the extremity of the world.” To visitors from the continent the island kingdom appeared a remote place, insignificant in a sense yet somehow admirable. The same traveler, the Frenchman Etienne Perlin, remarked that England was, “if compared with other small kingdoms, great”—a backhanded compliment that contradicted the more succinct judgment of the diplomat Antoine de Noailles, who always referred to England as “this nasty island.”¹ Perlin admired English men, whom he found to be “large, handsome and ruddy, with flaxen hair“; English women were, quite simply, “the greatest beauties in the world, as fair as alabaster,” and also “cheerful and courteous, and of a good address.” Their delightful custom of kissing everyone, even strangers, when they met had sent Erasmus into raptures. “If you were once to taste them, and find how delicate and fragrant they are,” he wrote, “you would certainly desire ... till death to be a sojourner in England.”

The people Mary now set herself to rule spoke a tongue foreigners found ungainly. To speak it they had to “inflect the tongue upon the palate, twist words in the mouth and maintain a sort of gnashing with the teeth,” an Italian wrote, and they spoke it with a vengeance, outdoing any other nation in the range and vehemence of their swearing. Even children and young people swore astonishingly, and no one seemed tocomplain or punish them for it. Their parents, though, had a worse habit. They loved to belch, “without reserve or shame, even in the presence of persons of the greatest dignity” and no meal was complete without a belching contest.

This national pastime undoubtedly had something to do with the heady beer the English consumed in such quantities. Strong beer, brewed from native wheat and barley and hops imported from Flanders, replaced ale as the cheapest and most abundant drink in the reign of Henry VIII. Known as “angels’ food,” “dragon’s milk,” “stride-wide” or “lift leg,” it went down well with the soft raisin-filled saffron cakes served in taverns, and no diversion was more agreeable to Mary’s subjects than to resort to the Magpie and Crown, the Whale and Crow, the Bible and Swan or the Leg and Seven Stars to drink “till they be red as cocks and little wiser than their combs.” The “double beer” they favored was as strong as whisky; it soon made men and women “stark staring mad like March-Hares,” and left them “drinking, brawling, tossing of the pitcher, staring, pissing and beastly spewing until midnight.”

The English climate was as insalubrious as the prevailing drinking habits. It was as a rule free of extremes of heat and cold, so that people wore furs all year round, but the “thickness of the air” bred diseases. There was “some litde plague” every year, and at least once in a generation the “atmospheric putrescence” gave rise to the terrors of the sweating sickness.

The effects of “thick air,” disease and poverty were most apparent in London, a city whose remarkable growth resulted in part from the grim want that had devastated rural England over the last twenty years. The uprooted, the unemployed and the starving all made their way to the capital, where they formed a “common abhorring” to offend respectable citizens. In the year before Mary’s reign began the Hospital of St. Bartholomew, a charitable institution organized to relieve the poor and ill, reported that it had either cured or buried nearly a thousand indigents “who would otherwise have stank in the noses of the city.”

But if visitors from Europe avoided London’s sprawling outskirts with their festering slums, they were impressed by its landmarks, its prosperity and brisk commercial life. The towering spires of St. Paul’s, London Bridge with its twenty arches and its shops with flowers in every window, the royal residences and noble houses along the river all charmed newcomers. They marveled at the numbers of ships that sailed up the river, and at the wonderful variety of goods that came from their holds. Tudor London was a merchant’s town, where both foreign and native tradesmen appeared to prosper even when the government was struggling to pay its creditors. The power of the guilds was unmistakable, and those who aspired to membership provided another conspicuous characteristic of the city. “In London you will see the apprentices in their gowns,” Perlin wrote, “standing against their shops and the walls of their houses bare-headed, in so much that passing through the streets you may count fifty or sixty thus stuck up like idols, holding their caps in their hands.”

Below the public mainstream of London life flourished another society: the Tudor underworld. This world had its own etiquette, its guilds, its social hierarchy, with carefully observed distinctions between rufflers, rogues, vagabonds and lower orders of evildoers. Highest in rank were the rufflers, ex-soldiers or servants turned out of their jobs to “wretchedly wander” the streets of the capital, flaunting self-inflicted wounds and pretending to be maimed soldiers returning from the wars. As only the flintiest heart could resist the sight of such noble misery, rufflers made almost as much in alms as the beggars who feigned epilepsy or the “Abraham-men” who danced and sang at street corners pretending to be mad. Below the rufflers were the rogues, more ordinary thieving beggars who extorted money by such underhanded means as attaching horse-locks to the outstretched arms of people who offered them money, and demanding larger sums to let them go.

Still lower in the hierarchy were the hookers or anglers, who spent their days walking from house to house, taking careful note of what in the way of clothing or linen the householder kept near the second-story window; the same night they returned, carrying a tall staff with a hook at one end, and plucked down everything of value. Hookers were said to be able to lift the bedclothes off unsuspecting citizens as they slept by their open windows, leaving them to wake cold and naked in their nightshirts and suppose that they had been the victims of goblins or elves. On good days these professionals made very good money—as much as three, four or five shillings—but on bad days they barely scraped by, or fell to robbing each other, and few escaped the hazards of their calling—the pillory, prison or the gibbet—for long. The luckiest of them got off with nothing more serious than the public humiliation of being “ridden about London” in a cart, wearing around their necks a placard listing their offenses, while householders emptied chamber pots on their heads or threw rotten eggs in their faces.²

With crime flourishing, rebellion frequent and public order non-existent, England had become a nation in arms. Knights and gentlemen went armed by custom, but common folk now followed their example. Churchmen too ordered their servants to carry shields, and farmers, when they plowed their lands, left their swords or bows in a corner of the field in case of need. “In this land,” Perlin wrote, “every body bears arms,” and he blamed the government for creating the climate of violence. Justice in England is “tyrannically administered,” he observed. The kingdomappeared to be governed by “shedding human blood in such abundance as to make it run into the rivulets,” and for the aristocracy, beheading had become an ancestral disease. “In this country you will scarcely find any nobleman, some of whose relations have not been beheaded.”

Even more shocking to visitors, though, than the arbitrary destruc-tiveness of the government was the physical destruction of the churches of London. “The city is much disfigured by the ruins of a multitude of churches and monasteries belonging heretofore to friars and nuns,” the ambassador Soranzo reported to the Venetian Senate. The devastation marred every street. Wrecked convents, parish churches with their naves gutted and their windows broken, vestiges of demolished shrines, graveyards and statues were the striking remains of the attempted obliteration of the old faith. The ruinous condition of English churches was not entirely unknown on the continent. For years boatloads of statues and paintings salvaged from their ruins had been arriving in French harbors, to be sold at Paris, Rouen and elsewhere.³ The French bought them eagerly, treasuring them as relics of the martyrdom of the faith in England and murmuring about sacrilege and desecration. Nothing could prepare devout Catholic visitors for the spectacle of the dismantled, dishonored churches of London, however, or for the gaunt Protestant divines, burning with conviction, who had been Edward’s preachers, and who still preached in the first weeks of Mary’s reign. Men like Latimer, Lever and John Knox cut sinners to ribbons with their tongues, lashing out at pride, greed and vanity in sermons that went on for two hours or more. What was less apparent to visitors from abroad, though, was that large groups within the population held only a marginal place in the community of believers. There were many English men and women whose outward observance of the ceremonies of the church covered a profound inward indifference. And there were others, in hamlets and villages and farms distant from any settlement, whose religious ideas were not far removed from the heathendom of their remote ancestors.

This heterogeneous population, archaic and conservative yet caught up in rapid change of every kind, was now to be ruled by England’s first crowned queen, Mary Tudor. The advent of a female ruler was in itself a remarkable innovation. There had been a woman ruler in England in the twelfth century, Henry I’s daughter Matilda, but she was not crowned during her brief reign and did not call herself queen. Matilda’s title was “daughter of king Henry and lady of England”; she avoided the Anglo-Saxon term cwen (queen) because it meant “wife,” and implied that she did not hold the throne in her own right.⁴ Matilda had not been able to hold her crown securely, and her reign set an unfortunate precedent. Happily for Mary the twelfth-century queen was all but forgotten. The most recent example of a woman holding political power in the BritishIsles was in Scotland, where Henry VIII’s sister Margaret had been regent for her infant son. Margaret was a genuine ruler, not just a figurehead; she controlled the appointment of officials and kept the treasury in her own hands. But her power provoked sharp criticism. Lord Dacre, ruler of the English lands along the Scots border, complained that the Scots “let any woman have authority, especially her,” and he spoke for nearly all the men Margaret encountered.⁵ Henry VIII spent the greater part of his reign avoiding the unthinkable eventuality of leaving a female heir. He had not trained either of his daughters to rule; certainly he never meant them to. All his life Henry’s idea of a ruler was a strong man leading a large army into battle, and the battlefield, he once remarked, was “unmeet for women’s imbecilities.”

Yet Henry had been forced to admit the capability of some women. Early in his reign he had left Katherine of Aragon to rule in his stead while he was on campaign in France, and later, when he believed he had made an enemy of her, he had no difficulty imagining Katherine at the head of an army, leading an armed rebellion against him. The sixteenth century was in fact an era of women rulers, and Mary had to look no farther than to Flanders to observe a highly capable one at work.

Her cousin Mary, regent of Flanders, had been ruling there for more than twenty years, ever since Charles V appointed her to succeed her aunt Margaret in the regency. Mary was short and delicately built, like her cousin in England, with the distinctive Hapsburg disfigurement of a thick lower lip, but at fifty she was as awesome as she had been in her thirties, when she regularly outrode, outshot and outhunted her male courtiers. Once when the humanist Roger Ascham was traveling in the German lands he met the regent on the road. She was riding alone, miles ahead of her retinue of thirty gentlemen, having accomplished a journey that invariably took seventeen days in thirteen. “She is a virago,” Ascham wrote admiringly. “She is never so well as when she is flinging on horseback [sic], and hunting all the night long.”⁶

The diplomats of the time unanimously conceded the regent’s intelligence and her shrewdness in statecraft. She “had courage enough for anything,” they noted; in character they compared her to her progenitor Charles the Bold.⁷ Yet despite her prodigious capabilities she was denied a place at the diplomatic table. During crucial peace negotiations with the French in 1555 the emperor sent an urgent message to his sister, asking her to join him and give him advice on exactly what concessions should be made. She came, she gave excellent advice in private, yet to the Venetians at the conference she sent her regret “at being prevented by her sex from attending ... as she earnestly desired.”⁸ As a younger woman even the ambassadors with greatest admiration for her put her biological function first in their dispatches, speculating that “by reason of her naturalvolatility, and from too much exercise and motion, she will have no posterity.” Her own final observation on her authority was both judicious and tragic. “A woman is never feared or respected as a man is, whatever her rank.”⁸

The idea of a woman at the head of state was abhorrent on principle. For a woman to rule her husband was unnatural; for her to rule a nation was a monstrous exaggeration of that unnatural condition. Men were strong and prudent, with the force of mind and greatness of soul to govern others; women were weak and thoughtless, lacking the logic, concentration and largeness of vision to guide any political body. It was common knowledge that women, like lunatics, were governed by the moon, making them unstable and capricious. However gifted or well inten-tioned she might be, no woman could escape this influence. Besides, all the imagery of royalty—of all authority—was male. For a woman to mount the throne offended the very concept of majesty. Politically, a woman ruler was a symbol of national impotence. More important, no queen could fill the ruler’s primary function in the larger order of the cosmos: to represent God to her people. Bishop Gardiner had defined this larger function. Kings, he wrote, were “representatives of God’s image unto men.” Their pan in God’s grand design was to reveal him more fully to their subjects. No woman could do that; given the inherent sinfulness of all women, it would be blasphemy for any female ruler to try.

Mary came to the throne at a time in English history when the idea of the monarch took on new scope. Through the sheer force of his size, his magnetism and his power to dominate others Mary’s father had reshaped the office of king. Put in the simplest terms, to the average English man or woman, a ruler was someone who looked and acted like Henry VIII. It is extremely doubtful whether any man could have stepped into Henry’s shoes—certainly the boy Edward had failed dismally—yet this was what Mary was called upon to do. Her task was made doubly difficult by her ambivalent feelings about her father and by the entire force of her education. During the nearly thirty-one years she had lived under his absolute authority Mary had loved and hated her father with equal force. She would never forgive him for the way he treated her mother, nor could she forget how he had treated her, yet since his death she had often invoked his presence in moments of crisis. He was her benchmark of political power; beside him all other authority faded. Mary-drew strength from the fact that she was Henry’s daughter as well as Katherine’s, and she was aware of having inherited his authority along with his throne and title.

Yet everything she had been taught since childhood robbed her of that strength and contradicted that authority. She had been trained to mistrust her judgment, fear her weakness, and feel shame for her sinfulness. She had never been taught to confront the world; instead her gaze had been turned inward, to focus on guarding her chastity and cultivating the gestures, expressions and tones of voice that symbolized it. Her intellectual achievement was formidable, but atrophied; its only formal purpose had been to encourage fretful introspection. In short, Mary was now raised to a political status that conflicted with her sexual status at every turn. The interplay between the two was to form an inescapable backdrop to her troubled reign.

At thirty-seven, Mary was a striking woman, despite her short stature. She was almost boyishly slender, with the bright auburn hair and rosy cheeks of a much younger woman. Her eyes were of an indefinite hazel color, and very large; her nose was “rather low and wide,” and gave her face character as well as a dignified beauty. In her most revealing portraits there is a defiant set to her features, and a faint sarcasm, though what impressed the Venetian Soranzo was Mary’s expression of “great benignity and clemency.” She set off her handsome appearance by “arraying herself elegantly and magnificently,” just as her father had. Like him she changed her clothes often, alternating between the close-fitting, trailing gown and kirtle worn by English gentlewomen and the French-style gown and bodice with huge, full sleeves. She wore the latter on state occasions, but even her everyday dress was sumptuous. She loved rich embroidery and expensive velvets and brocades. She had gowns and mantles made of costly cloth of gold and cloth of silver, and wore with them great quantities of jewels—on her fingers, around her neck, and as trimming for her gowns. Mary took exceptional delight in her jewels, the Venetian ambassador wrote. “Although she has a great plenty of them left her by her predecessors, yet were she better supplied with money than she is, she would doubtless buy more.”¹⁰

Mary’s love of finery was the only sign of self-indulgence in the severely disciplined life she led as queen. She rose at daybreak, said her prayers and heard a private mass and then, without pausing to eat, worked at her desk until one or two in the afternoon, when she took a light meal. She made herself available not only to the members of her Privy Council, from whom she heard “every detail of public business,” but to everyone else who asked audience of her, and went on transacting business and writing and answering letters with exhausting diligence every night until after midnight. Mary’s habit of spending nearly all her waking hours at the work of government was reminiscent of her grandmother Isabella. Nothing was allowed to interfere with her regimen but religious services, which took up several hours a day at least, and at the seasons of the great church feasts, many more. For convenience the leading members of the Council had rooms in the palace; by ancient customsome of them slept there. They met early each morning under the leadership of the chancellor, Stephen Gardiner, bishop of Winchester, and conferred with Mary periodically during the day.

Visitors to Mary’s court found her intelligence and competence impressive, and judged her to be “more than moderately read in Latin literature, especially with regard to Holy Writ.” To ambassadors she spoke Latin, French and Spanish; she understood Italian, though she did not speak it, and displayed a quickness of mind and an eloquence of expression which left no doubt of her capacity to rule. With her servants and others she was generous—some said too generous—with gifts of money and valuable objects. She also gave them her time and her concern, which soon lent her a reputation for simple goodness that clung to her throughout her reign. But Mary was fiercely proud too, and “inclined to talk about her exalted station.”¹¹ Renard called her “great-hearted, proud and magnanimous,” and she carried with her an air of solemnity that made even ordinary events seem important. Mary’s unshakable belief that she had come to the throne through divine intervention made her deeply serious about her responsibilities. According to Soranzo, her constant exclamation was “In thee, O lord, is my trust, let me never be confounded: if God be for us, who can be against us?”

Mary’s natural ability, her extraordinary dedication and her confident belief that she was divinely guided helped to sustain her at the outset of her reign. But there were hindrances as well, beyond the everpresent hindrance of her sex. Mary was reported to have a weak constitution, her habitual complaint troubled her from time to time, and her long working hours gave her headaches and sometimes heart palpitations.¹² She had found a diet that suited her, but she still had to be bled quite often, and to take various medicines. The first months of her reign were emotionally as well as physically exhausting, and throughout the fall of 1553 Mary was wishing she could get away to Flanders, to visit the regent, the cousin she had never seen. The sight of Mary of Flanders would surely “cure all her natural melancholy,” Mary wrote, “from which she constantly suffered.” With some exaggeration she added that she had “never known what it was to be happy.”¹³

Mary’s extremes of confidence and melancholy only confirmed the general impression among her ministers that she was unfit to run her own government. They consistently underestimated her, confusing her deference to their views with helplessness. She was to surprise them again and again with her capacity for hard work, her courage and her leadership in crises, but each time they quickly returned to their original impression. Simon Renard, who came to know Mary as well as anyone in her government, took a very dark view of her future as queen. “I know this queen,” he wrote to Charles V’s chief minister Cardinal Granvelle,“so good, so easy, without experience of life or of statecraft; a novice in everything. I will tell you honestly my opinion, that unless God guards her she will always be cheated and misled either by the French or her own subjects; and at last taken off by poison or some other means.”¹⁴