EPILOGUE
… Witness (alas!) may Marie be, late Queen of rare renown
Whose body dead, her virtues live, and doth her fame resowne….
She never closed her ear to hear the righteous man distress
Nor never spared her hand to help, when wrong or power oppress
Make for your mirror (Princes all) Marie, our mistress late….
Farewell, O Queen! O pearl most pure! that God or nature gave,
The earth, the heavens, the sprites, the saints cry honor to thy grave.
Marie now dead, Elizabeth lives, our just & lawful Queen,
In whom her sister’s virtues rare, abundantly are seen.
Obey our Queen, as we are bound, pray God her to preserve,
And send her grace life long and fruit, and subjects true to serve.
—“EPITAPH UPON THE DEATH OF QUENE MARIE, DECEASED” (CA. 1558)1
THE FORGING AND RECASTING OF MARY’S REPUTATION BEGAN immediately upon her death. One Richard Lante was imprisoned for printing this elegy without license, and the verses were swiftly reissued with a final stanza in praise of Elizabeth.2 Mary had requested that her executors “cause to be made some honourable tombs or decent memory” of her and her mother, but this, her dying wish, was ignored. Instead the anniversary of Mary’s death came to be remembered solely as “Elizabeth’s Accession Day,” an annual day of celebration and thanksgiving. Official prayers hailed the new queen, who had delivered the English people “from the danger of war and oppression, restoring peace and true religion, with liberty both of bodies and minds.”3
Mary quickly became a figure of opprobrium, as Protestants returning from exile sought to ingratiate themselves with the new regime. In The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, written on the eve of Mary’s death, John Knox condemned her as a “horrible monster Jezebel” and described how during her reign Englishmen had been “compelled to bow their necks under the yoke of Satan, and of his proud ministers, pestilent papists and proud Spaniards.”4 Knox argued that women were incapable of effective rule as they were by nature “weak, frail, impatient, feeble and foolish: and experience hath declared them to be inconstant, variable, cruel and lacking the spirit of counsel and regiment.”5 Female rule was “the subversion of good order, of all equity and justice.” Yet Knox quickly had to refine his views to accommodate the accession of a Protestant queen.6
In his Actes and Monuments of These Latter and Perillous Dayes, John Foxe, the most infamous returning exile, celebrated the passing of Mary’s reign. “We shall never find any reign of any Prince in this land or any other,” he wrote, “which ever shows in it (for the proportion of time) so many great arguments of God’s wrath and displeasure.” His detailed account of the lives of the Protestant martyrs graphically portrayed “the horrible and bloody time of Queen Mary.”7
Coinciding with the rise of the Accession Day festivities was the promulgation of an order that a copy of Foxe’s Actes and Monuments be installed in every “cathedral church.”8 By 1600, Catholicism was firmly understood to be an “un-English” creed and Protestantism an entrenched part of England’s national identity.
Foxe’s account would shape the popular narrative of Mary’s reign for the next four hundred and fifty years. Generations of schoolchildren would grow up knowing the first queen of England only as “Bloody Mary,” a Catholic tyrant who sent nearly three hundred Protestants to their deaths, a point made satirically in W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman’s 1930s parody 1066 and All That.9 Mary’s presence in a recent survey of the most evil men and women in history is testament to Foxe’s enduring legacy.10
But there is, of course, a different Mary: a woman marked by suffering, devout in her faith and exceptional in her courage. From a childhood in which she was adored and feted and then violently rejected, a fighter was born. Her resolve almost cost her her life as her father, and then her brother, sought to subjugate her to their wills. Yet Mary maintained her faith and self-belief. Despite repeated attempts to deprive her of her life and right to the throne, the warrior princess turned victor and became the warrior queen.
The boldness and scale of her achievement are often overlooked. The campaign that Mary led in the summer of 1553 would prove to be the only successful revolt against central government in sixteenth-century England. She, like her grandfather Henry VII and grandmother Isabella of Castile, had to fight for her throne. In the moment of crisis she proved decisive, courageous, and “Herculean”—and won the support of the English people as the legitimate Tudor heir.
Mary was a conscientious, hardworking queen who was determined to be closely involved in government business and policy making. She would rise “at daybreak when, after saying her prayers and hearing mass in private,” she would “transact business incessantly until after midnight.”11As rebels threatened the capital in January 1554 and she was urged to flee, Mary stood firm and successfully rallied Londoners to her defense. She was also a woman who lived by her conscience and was prepared to die for her faith. And she expected the same of others.
Her religious defiance was matched by a personal infatuation with Philip, her Spanish husband. Her love for him and dependence on her “true father,” the emperor Charles V, was unwavering. Her determination to honor her husband’s will led England into an unpopular war with France and the loss of Calais. There was no fruit of the union, and so at her premature death there was no Catholic heir. Her own phantom pregnancies, together with epidemics and harvest failures across the country, left her undermined and unpopular. Her life, always one of tragic contrast, ended in personal tragedy as Philip abandoned her, never to return, even as his queen lay dying.
In many ways Mary failed as a woman but triumphed as a queen. She ruled with the full measure of royal majesty and achieved much of what she set out to do. She won her rightful throne, married her Spanish prince, and restored the country to Roman Catholicism. The Spanish marriage was a match with the most powerful ruling house in Europe, and the highly favorable marriage treaty ultimately won the support of the English government. She had defeated rebels and preserved the Tudor monarchy. Her Catholicism was not simply conservative but influenced by her humanist education and showed many signs of broad acceptance before she died. She was an intelligent, politically adept, and resolute monarch who proved to be very much her own woman. Thanks to Mary, John Aylmer, in exile in Switzerland, could confidently assert that “it is not in England so dangerous a matter to have a woman ruler, as men take it to be.”12 By securing the throne following Edward’s attempts to bar both his sisters, she ensured that the crown continued along the legal line of Tudor succession. Mary laid down other important precedents that would benefit her sister. Upon her accession as the first queen regnant of England, she redefined royal ritual and law, thereby establishing that a female ruler, married or unmarried, would enjoy identical power and authority to male monarchs. Mary was the Tudor trailblazer, a political pioneer whose reign redefined the English monarchy.
Upon her accession Mary adopted the motto Veritas Temporis Filia—Truth is the Daughter of Time—in celebration of her establishment as England’s Catholic heir and the return of the “true faith.” In 1558, her younger sister wrested the motto from the dead queen, for the Protestant truth. It was not the only thing Elizabeth took from her predecessor. After Mary’s death, the coronation robes of England’s first queen were hastily refurbished—with a new bodice and sleeves—to fit its second.13
In certain things she is singular and without an equal; for not only is she brave and valiant, unlike other timid and spiritless women, but so courageous and resolute, that neither in adversity nor peril did she ever display or commit any act of cowardice or pusillanimity, maintaining always, on the contrary, a wonderful grandeur and dignity … it cannot be denied that she shows herself to have been born of a truly royal lineage.
—THE VENETIAN AMBASSADOR GIOVANNI MICHIELI