CHAPTER 44
In the beginning of November was the first notice among the people touching the marriage of the Queen to the King of Spain.1
—RESIDENT OF THE TOWER OF LONDON, 1553
ON NOVEMBER 16, 1553, MARY FACED A DEPUTATION OF SOME twenty members of the Commons seeking to dissuade her from marrying Philip. She had postponed the meeting for three weeks, claiming ill health; now she could delay no more. As Sir John Pollard, the speaker of the Commons, put it, it would displease the people to have a foreigner as the queen’s consort. If Mary died childless, her husband would deplete the country of money and arms. He might decide to remove Mary from the kingdom “out of husbandly tyranny,” and if he were left a widower with young children, he might try to usurp the crown for himself.2 Instead, the speaker argued, it would be better for the queen to marry an Englishman. Mary listened to Pollard’s long speech with exasperation. As she later told Renard, his discourse had been “so confused, so long-winded and prolific of irrelevant arguments,” that she had found it irritating and offensive.
Finally, when Pollard had finished and without waiting for the chancellor to answer on her behalf, Mary rose to address the assembly. She thanked it for encouraging her to marry but, as she went on, she said that she did not appreciate the idea that it should attempt to choose “a companion” for her “conjugal bed.” As she declared, “I now rule over you by the best right possible, and being a free woman, if any man or woman of the people of our realm is free, I have full right and sufficient years to discern a suitable partner in love”—both someone she could love and someone who would be to the benefit and advantage of the realm. It was, she told them,
entirely vain for you to nominate a prospective husband for me from your own fancy, but rather let it be my free choice to select a worthy husband for my bridal bed—one who will not only join with me in mutual love, but will be able with his own resources to prevent an enemy attack, from his native land.3
She warned that “if she were married against her will she would not live three months and she would have no children.” Her affairs had been conducted by divine disposition, and she would pray to God to counsel and inspire her in her choice of husband, “who would be beneficial to the kingdom and agreeable to herself … for she always thought of the welfare of her kingdom, as a good princess and mistress should.”4 Her riposte was so extraordinary that Pollard was rendered speechless and the deputation retired.
Mary suspected that Gardiner had inspired the speaker’s words and afterward challenged him directly. “She would never marry Courtenay,” she told him; “she never practiced hypocrisy or deceit, and had preferred to speak her mind, and she had come near to being angry on hearing such disrespectful words.”5 Mary asked him crossly, “Is it suitable, that I should be forced to marry a man because a bishop made friends with him in prison?” Courtenay was, she said, of “small power and authority,” and, given the intrigues of the French and the poverty of the kingdom, would not be the most desirable match.
Gardiner tearfully admitted that he had spoken with Pollard but now accepted that “it would not be right to try to force her in one direction or another.” He now swore to “obey the man she had chosen.”6 The Commons’ petition proved futile; Mary had already made her decision. On the day after Parliament was dissolved, her betrothal was made public.
MARY’S REBUTTAL OF the Commons’ challenge enhanced her authority. Never before had a Tudor ruler flaunted popular opinion, as expressed by Parliament, so openly. In the face of the Commons’ delegation, Mary had claimed the right to marry whomever she wished. By maintaining that she would marry as God directed her, “to his honour and to our country’s good,” she argued that her private inclination and the public welfare were compatible. But many within and outside the court remained discontented. As one contemporary observed, “This marriage was not well thought of by the Commons, nor much better liked by many of the nobility.”7
At end of the year, Mary wrote to Henry II, assuring him that her marriage to Philip would not alter her desire for amicable relations with France. Henry was not convinced. He told Sir Nicholas Wotton “that he clearly saw that she was allying herself with the greatest enemy he had in the world, and he knew marital authority to be very strong with ladies. He had not thought she would choose a match so odious to him.”8 As Renard reported, the French ambassador “is plotting openly against the alliance, and has spoken to several councillors and nobles to whom he has rehearsed all imaginable disadvantages,” spreading fears that England would be forced into war against France and that the country would become ever more subject to Spanish rule.9
When the imperial delegation arrived in the City of London to sign the marriage treaty on January 2, 1554, it was received coldly. The people, “nothing rejoicing, held down their heads sorrowfully.” As the retinue rode through the capital, “boys pelted them with snowballs; so hateful was the sight of their coming in to them.”10
Henry, meanwhile, instructed his ambassador:
If you see that the Queen is resolved to marry the Prince of Spain and also that there is likelihood that Courtenay has the will and means to upset the apple-cart, you may say still more confidently that you are sure that for such a great benefit to the realm [of England] I would not deny my favour either to him or to the other gentlemen who know the evil which the marriage could bring to the realm and would like to oppose it. However, since things are as they are, you must act prudently and with great caution.11
On December 1, Mary wrote to the emperor:
I would begin this letter by offering my excuses for not having written before … and would repeat in detail all my conferences with your Majesty’s ambassador, were it not that your letters show that he has omitted nothing, so I feel sure that he has explained all and freed me of the necessity.
He assures me that he has sent you accounts of the progress of the marriage negotiations he has conducted with me, telling you of my reply and professions of goodwill and affection for the Prince, my good cousin; the reasons founded on my zeal for my kingdom’s welfare, towards which I have the duty your Majesty is aware of, that moved me to give my consent; my belief in the Prince’s excellent qualities, and confidence that your Majesty will ever remain my good lord and father, and will offer terms in accordance. He also avers that he has not forgotten to transmit to your Majesty my most humble and affectionate thanks for the honour you have done me by proposing so great an alliance, for the mindfulness of my kingdom and myself and constant care for all my interests and concerns.12
As a token of the new accord, Charles had sent Mary “a large and valuable diamond”—“in witness of the fact,” he told his ambassadors, “that beyond our old friendship and in respect for her position, we now consider her as our own daughter in virtue of this alliance.” Their union saw the climax of Mary’s long-standing relationship with the emperor and the revival of the Anglo-Spanish entente established by Mary’s mother on her marriage to Prince Arthur, fifty-three years earlier.
On January 14, the terms of the treaty were officially proclaimed at Westminster “to the lords, nobility, and gentlemen” by the lord chancellor. As Gardiner explained, Mary had made her decision to wed Philip “partly for the wealth and enriching of the realm, and partly for friendship and other weighty considerations.”13 They should, he continued, “thank God that so noble, worthy, and famous a prince” would “humble himself as in this marriage to take upon him rather as a subject than otherwise; and that the Queen should rule all things as she doth now; and that there should be of the counsel no Spaniard.”14
It did little to allay fears. After Gardiner’s declaration of the terms of the marriage treaty, one chronicler described how the news was “very much misliked … almost each man was abashed, looking daily for worse matters to grow shortly after.”15