XXXIV

Now all shaven crowns to the standard.

Make room! pull down for the Spaniard!

When word spread that the queen meant to marry the prince of Spain the news unleashed a flood of outrage. Londoners claimed to know “Jack Spaniard” well, and they did not like him. They had observed his “pomping pride,” his “lusty liveries,” his pretended courtesy that hid villainy and vice. All Spaniards were thieves, they said, who after they robbed a man liked to “tread his head in the dust.” Every one of them, even the vilest beggar, demanded to be called a lord—señor in their tongue—and most of them had titles of honor besides. Their excesses with women were well known, and if Philip married Mary he would soon tire of her and seek his pleasure elsewhere, caring about as much for her as for an old pair of shoes.

Protestants in the capital swore “they would rather die than suffer Spaniards to rule this country,” and Catholics liked the prospect no better. One English traveler who had visited the Spanish court sent back to England a vivid description of what Mary’s palace would be like once Philip and his Spaniards were turned loose in it. The queen’s orderly staff of officials and underlings would be swept away and in its place the Spaniards would bring cobblers, woodmongers, pointers, pinners and peddlers, and “all kinds of lousy loiterers,” each with his open bottle tied around his neck. These drunken wretches would line the courtyards and galleries of the palace, swaying over their work, while the Spanish guardsmen—“bawdy, burly beasts”—left the halls and gates of the palace open to “beggars, slaves and all kinds of wretches.” In no time at all bread and beer would be sold in the stately reception rooms, while the courtyard would be full of oxen, cows, “hoggish old swine,” sheep, goats,cats, dogs, geese, ducks, cocks and hens, all “rubbing, rooting, digging, delving and donging” before Mary’s chamber window.

If some found the idea of Spaniards at court ludicrous, many found it terrifying. Spanish rule was known to be harsh, Spanish governors cruel. Visions of mail-clad armies marching through the English countryside mowing down English yeomen spread panic throughout the southwest. At Plymouth, where commoners and gentry alike had hoped Mary would choose Courtenay, the mayor and aldermen sent a secret message through Noailles to the French king, asking him to take the town under his protection against the time the prince of Spain might try to land there. The men of Plymouth were resolved not to receive him or to obey his commands, they said, and the gentlemen of the region were prepared to back the townspeople in their resistance.¹

To the French the possibility of a Hapsburg ruler in England was alarming in the extreme. When Henri II heard rumors of the impending betrothal his “countenance was sad, his words few, and his dislike of the match marvellously great.”² He held a long conversation with the English ambassador, Nicholas Wotton, pointing out that “a husband may do much with his wife,” and that it would be very hard for Mary, as for any woman, “to refuse her husband anything that he shall earnestly require of her.”³ Philip would certainly ask Mary to lend him her ships and fighting men to aid his father in his wars against the French, and before long Philip would be ruling England instead of Mary.

Wotton tried in vain to combat these fears, while in England Noailles attempted to convince Mary herself of the hidden dangers of marrying Philip. He too raised the specter of husbandly tyranny, but she assured him that God would not let her forget the promise she had made to her first husband, England, on her coronation day. Mary repeated this argument often in the last months of 1553, looking down at the ring she had worn ever since her coronation and referring to the pre-eminence of her “first husband.” When other persuasions failed the French resorted to theological objections. Philip and Mary were close relatives—Philip referred to Mary as his “aunt” for want of a better term to describe his father’s cousin—and as such their marriage was forbidden under church law. Marriages between persons related by blood were subject to the “impediment of public honesty,” the accusation that they offended common decency, and their validity could be contested in court. While English courts did not uphold suits of this kind many foreign courts did, and even if no one questioned Mary’s marriage to Philip directly, their children might later be prevented from inheriting their lands on the continent on the grounds that the union between their parents was invalid.

To the English who opposed the marriage these legal complicationswere part of a larger concern. They perceived the queen’s marriage to be not unlike the marriage of any other gentlewoman; they assumed, without thinking clearly about it, that England would in some sense be part of Mary’s dowry, and as such would become her husband’s property when she married. Thus Mary’s husband would obtain a vague but ineradicable sovereignty over the country whether or not he actually became king, and Mary proposed to hand over this sovereignty to the heir of the Haps-burg empire. The dilemma of a woman ruler in a society where men controlled property was becoming clear: an unmarried queen was unthinkable, yet a married queen invited fresh political dangers. That Mary might, like her grandmother Isabella, retain her autonomy within her marriage was something none of her subjects thought possible.

Yet she was clearly setting her distinctive stamp on the court and government. Not since the death of Henry VIII had the ruler’s personality, taste and style so dominated court life. Mary put herself to the fore much as her father had, consciously keeping herself the center of attention by the magnificence of her dress and the dignity of her manner. Like Henry she adorned herself with innumerable jewels, setting all who saw her to speculating on their worth and rarity. She was careful to promote her symbolic image as well. One of the first things she did after becoming queen was to have a large portrait of herself painted, and the French ambassador wrote to his queen that the greatest compliment she could pay Mary would be to ask her for her portrait.⁴ Shortly after her coronation Mary issued her first coins. They too bore her effigy, and on the reverse the legend “Veritas temporis filia”—“Truth the daughter of time.” The humanist motto was a metaphor of vindication, a succinct assertion of Mary’s belief that, after the long night of Protestantism and injustice her reign would restore justice and the true religion.

Mary’s courtiers echoed her tastes in dress, food and entertainment. Clothing at Edward’s court had been simple and subdued; Mary’s ladies and gentlewomen wore rich velvets and damasks in bright colors, set off with trimmings and laces and complemented by jewels. Soon after they arrived in England the imperial ambassadors sent word to Flanders that Mary was fond of wild boar meat, and before long hunters were riding regularly through the fields along the Flemish coast, tracking wild boar to send to England. The hunting was best in the French and imperial territories, and when Mary commanded her captain at Guines, Lord Grey, to supplement the regent’s gift of boar meat with some of his own, he nearly caused an international incident by leading his men over the farms of the French pale in pursuit of the queen’s favorite game. The French peasants spoiled the hunt and killed the Englishmen’s hounds, whereupon the English rounded up the countrymen and cut off a piece of their ringleader’s ear. The incident was reported to the French commander atArdres, whose complaint led to an airing of pent-up grievances on both sides of the border. The quarrel was settled, though, in time for Lord Grey to send the queen a great baked boar before the end of the year.⁵

Mary celebrated her first Christmas as queen by ordering the staging of the interlude originally written for her coronation. The action of the play has not survived, but a list of the characters and costumes suggests that it portrayed the suffering of Mankind (in purple satin) at the hands of Deceit, Self-love, Scarcity, Sickness, Feebleness and Deformity (in red, green and ash-colored satin). With the involvement of good and bad angels, Reason, Verity and Plenty (in purple satin) triumphed, to the benefit of Mankind, and a black damasked Epilogue closed out the performance. A more explicitly political play was John Heywood’s Respub-lica, performed in London at the same season. Respublica described in allegorical form the misgovernment of Somerset and Dudley and the restoration of governmental virtue under Mary. The members of Edward’s Council—Oppression, Insolence, Avarice and Adulation—wronged, tormented and robbed the country mercilessly, until People, “with a wide throat,” roared out against them. With the arrival of “the general Verity, Old time’s daughter”—Mary—the republic was saved and the Vices overthrown, and People rejoiced that he could once again buy himself a new coat and clink a few coins in his purse.⁶

With playwrights saluting her as the savior of her people, courtiers flattering her and diplomats filling their dispatches with news of her government and her marriage plans Mary was at home with her office by the end of 1553. Her public serenity was more apparent than real, but her private joy at the forthcoming marriage grew greater with each piece of news Renard brought her. By mid-November she was declaring that Renard “had made her fall in love with his Highness,” adding jokingly that “his Highness might not be obliged to him for it, though she would do her best to please him in every way.”⁷

When a full-size portrait of Prince Philip arrived a few weeks later she became even more enamored of him. It was a Titian portrait, painted some three years earlier, and in it Philip wore a blue coat trimmed in white wolfskin. It was a good if flattering likeness, and Mary was no doubt relieved to see that the man represented to her as uncommonly handsome had, at least, shapely limbs and regular features. Everyone who had lived at the court of Henry VIII remembered the king’s greatest mistake—Anne of Cleves—and knew the dangers of misleading portraiture. The regent, who sent Mary the portrait, told her the likeness was not exact, but made it clear that the prince was even better looking than he had been when he posed for Titian, with a more manly body and a fuller beard.⁸

At this time too Granvelle sent Antonio Moro to England to paintMary’s portrait, but she had little time to spare for sitting idle while he sketched. Matters of diplomacy and administration, large and small, pressed in upon her with greater urgency every month. The French king asked her to mediate his dispute with the emperor. Foreign merchants asked her for licenses to avoid paying customs. Courtiers petitioned for offices, pensions and other favors. A decision had to be made about the title “Supreme Head of the church,” a relic of the two preceding reigns that was part of the royal style but that Mary refused to adopt because it denied papal authority. After consulting with Renard, her councilors and, by letter, with Cardinal Pole, who told her the phrase “misbecame her sex,” Mary got around the problem by putting “et cetera” in place of the actual words of the style.

Criminals of uncommon boldness and notoriety had to be sought out and brought to justice. Thieves robbed Lady Knevet of her plate in the fall of 1553, and because it was assumed they had taken it to Paris to sell, it was up to Mary and the Council to try to find them. The men’s identities were known, and the English ambassador in France, Wotton, sent one of his servants to Paris to ask the French goldsmiths for help in tracking them down. The servant made the rounds of the city, looking “everywhere Englishmen commonly resort there,” but without success.⁹ Crimes along the Scots border took up more of the Council’s time. On the pretext of fishing in the Tweed, the Scots were grouping under the walls of Norham Castle at night, to the danger of the garrison; the ancient fishing boundaries had to be enforced. The Scots complained that the English were stealing their cattle; the English retorted that the beasts were taken on the English side of the border, and their owners could only get them back on payment of a fine, and the Council concurred. A “lewd Englishman” provoked a quarrel with a Scot, and the Scots claimed it led to murder; the Council believed the report was exaggerated, but in any case the Scots were guilty of so many murders of Englishmen they could not possibly recite them all.¹⁰

These and similar matters—grievances of merchants, complaints of piracy and border encroachments—made up only a small part of the day to day work of the queen and her Council. It took time for the lax administrative practices of the preceding reign to be corrected. As late as January of 1554 Mary’s clerks were still occasionally sending out official documents sealed with King Edward’s seal instead of the queen’s, leading to delays and added work for the chancery.¹¹ The most serious issue faced by Mary’s government, however, was a severe financial crisis. The queen admitted to Renard in November that there was no money in the country, and that Dudley’s rule had left the treasury ,©700,000 in debt. Her agent Thomas Gresham was hard at work in Antwerp, trying to raise loans, but here too the dead weight of the previous reign proved to be ahandicap. Gresham had to straighten out the dishonest dealings of his predecessor Christopher Dawntesey while competing with the agents of Charles V and those of the great towns for what little money the bankers had to loan. Once he did negotiate a loan he was faced with the problem of conveying the money safely to England, and finally decided to pack the coins inside suits of armor—a method he had used before with success.

Mary was not unique in her financial difficulties, of course. Late in 1553 the French king was trying desperately to borrow all the money he could, and was taking his nobles’ plate to melt down for coins. The emperor too was borrowing enormous sums from the Flemish bankers, and the regent had had to take a loan of two million florins in 1552. But in the empire finance was a vast drama in which the imperial treasury was repeatedly saved from bankruptcy by the timely arrival of ships heavy with the plundered riches of the New World. As Mary’s agent Gresham was toiling to squeeze sixty thousand florins from the reluctant Antwerp banker Jaspar Schetz, Charles V’s financial clerks were weighing out newly arrived treasure from the Americas worth five million ducats in gold.¹²

However serious England’s financial problems might be, the men who came to Mary’s first Parliament in October and November were preoccupied with the dismaying probability of the queen’s marriage to a powerful foreigner. They thought in terms of the legal and political hazards of the match, and of the impossibility of binding either party to fulfill their contractual agreements. “In case the bonds should be broken between the husband and wife,” one member asked, “each of them being Princes in their own country, who shall sue the bonds?”¹³ There was no natural arbiter for marital quarrels when the spouses were both sovereigns in their own right, and if Philip would need no defender in such quarrels, Mary almost certainly would. On November 16 a delegation from the Commons, led by Speaker Pollard and accompanied by some dozen or more of the councilors, met with the queen in an effort to dissuade her from marrying Philip. The delegation was superfluous, as Mary had already given her solemn oath to go ahead with the marriage and most of the Council members had been won over to supporting it. But the Commons knew nothing of this, and the Speaker had taken pains preparing an eloquent discourse for the occasion.

His speech was very solemn and very long, “full of art and rhetoric and illustrated by historical examples.” He told Mary how it would displease the people to have a foreigner as the queen’s consort, and how the foreigners in his retinue would make themselves hateful and “lord it over the English.” If Mary died childless her husband would lose no time in carrying money, artillery, and everything else of value back to his owncountry. He might decide to take her out of the country too, “out of husbandly tyranny,” and if she left him a widower with young children he would probably try to usurp the throne for himself.

Mary listened to this outpouring for a time, but the longer it went on the more exasperated she became. Pollard had unfortunately forgotten his notes, and his extemporaneous ramblings were, she later told Renard, “so confused, so long-winded and prolific of irrelevant arguments” that she found them irritating and offensive. As he spoke Mary was formulating a point-by-point reply, for she had decided to depart from the customary practice of allowing the chancellor to answer on behalf of the sovereign. When Pollard finally finished she rose to address the assembly.

She thanked them dryly for advising her to marry, but as for the rest of the advice “she found it very strange.” It was hardly traditional for Parliament to recommend to the ruler whom she should marry, nor was it “suitable or respectful.” Mary tossed off her arguments with skill, her words judicious but full of anger and occasional sarcasm. History showed that even when the ruler was a minor Parliament had never interfered with the choice of a consort. All the nobles present could vouch for the fact that the behavior of the Commons was unprecedented and thoroughly inappropriate. Furthermore, if she were forced to marry a man who did not please her she would die within three months, leaving the kingdom worse off than ever and defeating the prime purpose of the marriage—namely the birth of an heir. With this direct and telling threat she closed her rebuttal, assuring the Speaker and his colleagues that she had the good of the kingdom as much in mind as they did, and that in the question of her marriage, as in all her other affairs, she would be guided by the inspiration of God.

The extraordinary sight of the queen answering the Speaker in person made almost as great an impression on her audience as the force of her logic. The nobles present backed her in this, and “said she was right,” while Arundel afterward ridiculed Gardiner, saying that “he had lost his post of Chancellor that day, for the Queen had usurped it,” and the other councilors laughed heartily at his expense. Mary had in fact become contemptuous of what she perceived as Gardiner’s equivocation. It had not taken her long to understand his tricks, she told Renard. One day he would assure her, when it suited his purpose, that the people would obey her, while the next day, “speaking on a matter that touched him personally,” he would try to frighten her with the prospect of rebellion.¹⁴ She was beginning to understand why the Protestants called her chancellor “Doctor Doubleface,” and was finding that there was more to the accusation than Gardiner’s embarrassing change of views on the question of Henry VIII’s marriage to Katherine.

Mary suspected Gardiner, in fact, of prompting the Speaker to addressher on the subject of her marriage, and of supplying him with his arguments. Several days after her meeting with Pollard and the Commons she confronted the chancellor and accused him of intrigue with the Speaker, She wanted him to understand, once and for all, that no matter what means he used to persuade her otherwise she would never marry Courte-nay. The Speaker’s “disrespectful words” had nearly made her angry, she said, and she did not intend to listen to any more advice about what husband to choose.

The chancellor broke down completely. He confessed with tears that he had spoken with Pollard and coached him in his speech, and that it was true he had always been fond of Courtenay ever since then-imprisonment together, Mary asked Gardiner disdainfully whether he seriously meant to suggest that she marry a man just because he had befriended him in prison, and then went on to give a cogent summary of the extreme disadvantages of Courtenay as a consort—his “small power and authority,” his intrigues with the French, England’s need for money, and so on. Finally the chancellor gave in entirely, saying that “it would not be right to try to force her in one direction or another,” and swearing to “obey the man she had chosen.”¹⁵

Mary emerged unscathed from her encounters with Parliament and the chancellor, and with an added measure of authority. Renard’s fears for her competence were quieted, at least for the moment, and he admired her “steadfastness and courage” in dealing with Gardiner, But the marriage question, important though it was, had little to do with the deeper issues that divided the country. Parliament had begun to come to terms with some of these, revoking the “corrupt and unlawful sentence” of Henry’s divorce from Katherine and, by implication, making Elizabeth a bastard again. Jane and Guilford Dudley were attainted, along with Cranmer, and a further step was taken to rid the country of the archbishop’s Protestant liturgy when a law was passed making it illegal to perform any service but that in use at the time of Henry VlII’s death after December 20 of the present year. All of Edward’s Protestant statutes were repealed, after a week of “marvelous dispute,” but the principle that the sovereign and not the pope ruled the English church remained intact. Mary had got around using the term “Supreme Head” in her title, but she had to sit by and allow Parliament to retain it on her behalf in its laws.

Any further progress toward a complete return to Catholicism would have been impossible, for throughout the parliamentary sessions there were outbreaks of violence over the clergy and the mass. In one village church an arquebus was aimed at the priest who was saying mass, but it misfired. In Norfolk and Kent parishioners rioted and prevented mass from being celebrated, and it was being said that elsewhere two priestshad actually been killed. Mary herself had been living with assassination threats since September, and it was a mark of her courage and flair for rulership that she continued to appear in public ceremonies and court audiences as freely as if no danger existed. Several plots against Gardiner’s life had been uncovered since the reign began, forcing him to move into Mary’s palace in order to be under her protection.¹⁶

A week before Parliament dissolved Mary’s courtiers were seriously frightened. As the queen was passing through a gallery on her way to vespers, accompanied by Elizabeth and a number of others, an unseen voice cried out loudly “Treason!” The courtiers scattered, but Mary, unperturbed by the alarm, went on into the chapel to hear the office. It was later found that the accusation was meant for Gardiner, and came from a man the bishop had imprisoned many years earlier for writing a treatise in defense of Katherine of Aragon; but at the time no one doubted that the cry was directed at the queen. Elizabeth was so frightened she turned pale and “could not compose her countenance.” She was amazed, she said, that Mary had not retired to safety after receiving such a warning, given the danger of an attack on her person. Elizabeth herself could not stop trembling, and had to get Susan Clarencieux to rub her stomach until the color came back to her face and she was able to join Mary at the altar.