Unlike Matilda four hundred years earlier, the legitimacy of Mary’s cause had won overwhelming recognition, confronted as she was with a rival who had no advantage of sex or consecration to compete with her lineal right. Like Matilda, however – and Eleanor, Isabella and Margaret after her – Mary was faced with assumptions embedded deep within the political culture over which she now presided about the conditional nature of female authority and the limitations of female capabilities.
The queen was ‘of a sex which cannot becomingly take more than a moderate part’ in government and public business, the Venetian ambassador to England, Giovanni Michieli, remarked in passing to the doge and senate in 1557. Four years earlier, before he learned of the ‘device’ by which Northumberland’s regime planned to place Jane Grey on the throne, ‘the inferiority of the female sex’ had also occurred to Ambassador Scheyfve as one of the ‘other points which they may raise’ to discount Mary as her brother’s heir. Even once she had proved the emperor’s envoys profoundly wrong in their reading of the crisis and the potential of her leadership, Charles V himself had no doubt, when he wrote to proffer advice three days into her reign, of the constraints which her sex would impose on her rule.
Let her be in all things what she ought to be: a good Englishwoman, and avoid giving the impression that she desires to act on her own authority, letting it be seen that she wishes to have the assistance and consent of the foremost men of the land … You will also point out to her that it will be necessary, in order to be supported in the labour of governing and assisted in matters that are not of ladies’ capacity, that she soon contract matrimony with the person who shall appear to her most fit from the above point of view.
Just as in 1141 when Matilda stood on the brink of power, the contradictions implicit in the prospect of a female monarch were precipitated into the open by Mary’s extraordinary and unfamiliar situation. No king could have tolerated the proposition that he should not ‘act on his own authority’. For Mary’s father Henry VIII just as much as Matilda’s father Henry I, that function – which was simultaneously a right and a responsibility – was the essence of his power. Just a century earlier, the intractable challenges with which Margaret of Anjou had wrestled on behalf of her inert husband had demonstrated how profoundly destructive a king who failed to act on his own authority could be. Yet Mary was being told that for her to do so as queen would be incompatible with being a ‘good Englishwoman’. Here, there are irresistible echoes of the chronicler’s outrage that Matilda should dare, with an ‘arrogant demeanour instead of the modest gait and bearing proper to the gentle sex’, to arrange ‘everything as she herself thought fit and according to her own arbitrary will’.
Mary’s situation, however, was significantly different from that of her forebear, and it made possible a significantly different response. Matilda’s victory over her rival had been partial and provisional; Mary’s was complete. Matilda had had to attempt to call her authority into being through the process of exercising it; Mary could bide her time before she revealed her hand. Mary, then, had no immediate need to challenge assumptions on the part of the emperor or her own subjects that she would need assistance in ‘matters that are not of ladies’ capacity’. She offered no resistance to the suggestion that her rule would require a husband’s help, and three days before her coronation, she made a remarkable appeal to the members of her council. Sinking to her knees before the astonished assembly, she spoke at length of the providential circumstances of her accession, the duties of kings and queens, and her determination to fulfil her responsibilities to the glory of God and the benefit of her people. Then she addressed her councillors directly. ‘She had entrusted her affairs and person, she said, to them, and wished to adjure them to do their duty as they were bound by their oaths …’ ‘Her councillors were so deeply moved that not a single one refrained from tears,’ the imperial ambassadors reported. ‘No one knew how to answer, amazed as they all were by this humble and lowly discourse, so unlike anything ever heard before in England, and by the queen’s great goodness and integrity.’
It is hard to know, without access to Mary’s thoughts as well as her words, how much of this public performance was impelled by conviction and how much by strategy. Certainly, she was intelligent and highly educated, fluent in four languages and competent in a fifth, with a ‘facility and quickness of understanding’, the Venetian ambassador noted with generous condescension, ‘which comprehends whatever is intelligible to others, even to those who are not of her own sex – a marvellous gift for a woman’. At the same time, she was by temperament profoundly orthodox in ways that went further than her deeply felt faith, sustained as she had been through twenty years of uncertainty and suffering by her mother’s example of the female virtues of constancy, piety, duty and patience.
But whether or not Mary genuinely believed that, as a woman, she would require help in governing her kingdom, it was unarguably true, first, that she needed to find a way of managing a council composed of a dangerously unstable mix of her own loyal Catholic servants and those experienced Protestant politicians who had so narrowly extricated themselves from Jane Grey’s short-lived regime. As the emperor’s ambassadors shrewdly noted, the unaccustomed sight of their queen on her knees appealing for their assistance and their loyalty might well have encouraged some of her lords and ministers to conclude that she was acting out of ‘timidity and fear’; ‘but, however that may be’, they went on, ‘it has certainly softened several hearts and turned them away from thoughts of an evil and suspicious nature’. In the absence of a male rival embodying a more conventionally commanding model of kingship, Mary was discovering that female ‘frailties’ could on occasion be deployed to politically disarming effect.
The second inescapable truth was that the queen did require a husband – and quickly – if she were to give birth to an heir. As things stood, by her father’s will and the act of parliament that had vindicated her own accession to the throne, her next heir was her half-sister Elizabeth. In Mary’s eyes, however, Elizabeth was illegitimate, born to Anne Boleyn before the death of Katherine of Aragon, Mary’s adored mother and Henry VIII’s rightful wife. Elizabeth was also a Protestant, whose current gestures towards Catholicism bore the unmistakable stamp of the princess’s political agility rather than any spiritual revelation. For the moment the queen was prepared to treat her sister with gracious magnanimity, but it was an intolerable prospect that her own death should deliver England into heresy and the crown to Anne Boleyn’s bastard. A husband, therefore, was a necessity, if not quite for the reasons the emperor had adduced, and, at thirty-seven, Mary had no time to lose.
With her council in harness and the search for a husband in train, the queen’s rule had begun – and despite her imperial cousin’s advice, the substance, rather than the decorously feminine style, of her decision-making revealed Mary’s determination that she would indeed ‘act on her own authority’. The first step was her coronation, the moment when God’s vindication of her sovereignty was given sacramental form. It was a matter for regret that the parliamentary statute by which her father had declared Mary illegitimate could not be repealed before this sacred ritual took place, but she could allow no suggestion that her title to the throne depended on parliamentary sanction. Kings, after all, called parliaments, rather than the other way around. Two days before the opening of her first parliament, therefore, Mary was crowned amid the splendour of Westminster Abbey.
For those fluent in the language of royal iconography, the procession in which she made her way from the Tower to the palace of Westminster on the eve of the ceremony reflected the complex novelty of political circumstance in October 1553. Through streets filled with painstakingly rehearsed pageants, fluttering streamers and crowds cheering until they were hoarse, the queen was attended by the great and the good, servants, nobles and diplomats, just as a king would be. But Mary herself adopted the visual style of queens past, all of whom had acquired their crowns not by right but by marriage. Her slight figure was carried in an open litter lined with the same dazzling white cloth of gold of which her gown was made, her auburn hair hanging loose around her shoulders like that of a bride on her wedding day, in token of the purity and fertility that were the chief attributes of a royal consort.
Purity and fertility mattered to Mary too, as a virtuous woman who hoped for an heir. But for her, unlike the kings’ wives who had set the ceremonial precedents for queenly coronations, those qualities were just two among many she was required to embody as a female sovereign. And it was a very different example that she followed the next day in the hush of the abbey. Then, she was robed in crimson like her male predecessors as she received the orb, sceptre, ring, spurs and sword that represented the powers of a king. She was anointed, like a king, on the shoulders, breast, forehead and temples (with holy oil specially sent from the continent, to avoid any possible contamination from the Protestant practices of her brother’s reign). Finally, the imperial crown of England, not a consort’s coronet, was placed upon her head.
Now that she was a monarch by every measure and every ceremony that her forefathers had enjoyed, Mary could turn her attention to the question of her marriage. But while the queen, her subjects and her allies were agreed that she needed a husband, it was not so easy to arrive at an acceptable consensus about which particular husband she should take. In retrospect, it was becoming increasingly apparent that being a woman alone had helped her cause in the crisis of the summer: it had been possible for her supporters to unite in hope that she would make the right (as yet unspecified) choice of spouse, rather than finding themselves divided by differences of opinion about one she already had. But now the nettle had to be grasped – and at the heart of the problem was the unresolved question of the balance of authority between husband and wife when the wife wore a crown. If Mary took a husband, would England acquire a king?
That unsettling possibility persuaded many of her subjects that their queen should marry an Englishman, for fear, as the late duke of Northumberland had warned and the emperor himself now ruminated, that ‘foreigners, whom the English more than any other nation abhor, would interfere with the government’. The leading candidate was Edward Courtenay, earl of Devon, one of the last remaining representatives of the Plantagenet line through his grandmother, a daughter of Edward IV. The threatening combination of his dangerously royal blood and his parents’ closeness to Katherine of Aragon had persuaded Henry VIII to incarcerate Courtenay in the Tower from the age of twelve, but now, at twenty-seven, he re-emerged from confinement into the political limelight, hailed as ‘the flower of the English nobility’ and the great white hope of those who hoped that Mary would marry within the realm.
The extensive support for Courtenay’s suit among the queen’s household and council was given public voice on 16 November by an extraordinary parliamentary delegation including many of her greatest nobles and churchmen. On their behalf, the Speaker of the Commons lectured Mary at length on ‘all the disadvantages, dangers and difficulties that could be imagined or dreamt of in the case of her choosing a foreign husband’, Ambassador Renard reported. These ranged from the weighty to the relatively superficial (‘the foreigners would wish to lord it over the English; the kingdom would be put to expense in entertaining them’), but in essence boiled down to the threat that England might lose its independence if its queen were subjected to ‘husbandly tyranny’ from abroad.
Mary’s response was immediate and unequivocal. Convention had it that the Lord Chancellor should respond to parliament on the sovereign’s behalf, but Mary’s Lord Chancellor was Bishop Gardiner of Winchester, who was not only her most loyal prelate but Courtenay’s most committed advocate. The queen – who had been profoundly irritated by both tone and content of a homily ‘so confused, so longwinded and prolific of irrelevant arguments that she was obliged to sit down’, she complained to Renard – therefore chose to speak for herself. ‘Parliament was not accustomed to use such language to the kings of England,’ she told the unfortunate Speaker trenchantly, ‘nor was it suitable or respectful that it should do so.’
What had roused her anger more than anything in his ill-judged address was the proposition that she should marry one of her own subjects. Mary’s views on the sacrament of marriage were as traditional and conservative as the rest of her faith: ‘she would wholly love and obey him to whom she had given herself, following the divine commandment, and would do nothing against his will’, she had told Renard a month earlier. But her views on the majesty of her own sovereign authority were equally traditional and conservative. How could she love and obey a man who was already bound in obedience to her? Only outside her realm would she find a husband whose status was commensurate with her own. And in that case, too, her private duties as a wife could be distinguished clearly from her public responsibilities as England’s queen. She would wholly love and obey her husband, she had informed Renard; ‘but if he wished to encroach in the government of the kingdom she would be unable to permit it’.
For twenty years, ever since she had been declared a bastard at the age of seventeen, it had been impossible, in practice, for Mary to marry because of the toxic combination of her potential political significance and her profoundly uncertain status. Now, she found herself suddenly transformed into the most eligible woman in Europe, albeit one whose exalted rank meant that few suitors were qualified to seek her hand. Faced with this disconcerting reversal of fortune, her first thought was to look to the cousin who had done so much to sustain her during her long years of internal exile: the widowed Emperor Charles V himself, who had first been proposed as her husband when he was a young man of twenty-two and she a child of six. But at fifty-three, Charles was exhausted and ailing, immobilised by gout, catarrh and haemorrhoids, and he had no appetite for another marriage. In his place, however, he proposed his son and heir Philip, who was already ruling Spain on his father’s behalf. And by the time Mary responded so angrily to her subjects’ representations in favour of an English husband, she had already committed herself to this Spanish match.
Her decision has been seen, by English contemporaries and many historians since, as the defining mistake of her reign. By this account she was, in Ambassador Renard’s words, ‘easily influenced, inexpert in worldly matters and a novice all round’, a queen who, in relying too heavily on the support of the emperor and his envoys, badly underestimated the depth of her subjects’ objections to a marriage alliance in which she was emotionally over-involved. Evidence to support this analysis is not difficult to find: Renard’s encrypted despatches repeatedly emphasised how much the queen was ‘inexperienced in the conduct of public affairs’, and Mary herself maintained in her dealings with the emperor the tone of submissive gratitude that she had adopted in the difficult years before her accession to the throne.
In hindsight, certainly, it is clear that her determination to marry Philip had profound and destructive drawbacks. But a similarly retrospective look at the spectacularly disastrous marriages later made by her royal cousin Mary, queen of Scots, to her lords Darnley and Bothwell might also suggest that, in refusing to marry one of her own subjects, Mary Tudor was prescient rather than myopic. In fact, given the urgency of her need in the autumn of 1553 to find someone who would pass muster as a royal husband, there were compelling reasons for Mary to look favourably on Philip as a suitor. Not least of these was the traditional convergence of geopolitical and economic interests between England on the one hand and, on the other, Spain and the Netherlands (both of which territories, thanks to the marriage of Charles V’s parents, now formed part of his sprawling empire) – a long-standing alignment disturbed in recent years by religious upheaval in England, but given renewed significance by the imminent union between the queen of Scotland and the heir to France.
Mary herself was the incarnation of an earlier Anglo-Spanish alliance – and the dynastic heritage she shared with Philip also suggested the possibility of a shared understanding about how the marriage of two monarchs might work. While the history of France had excluded women from the royal succession completely, and that of England had left the issue undecided until that very summer, in the Spanish kingdom of Castile a precedent in favour of female rule had been set by the twelfth-century Queen Urraca, who had succeeded to her father’s throne two decades before Matilda attempted to do the same in England. Four centuries later, that precedent had helped to enable Mary’s maternal grandmother (and Philip’s great-grandmother) Isabella to wear the crown of Castile in her own right, and to maintain her independent sovereignty throughout her marriage to Ferdinand, the king of neighbouring Aragon. Could Mary and Philip not emulate their illustrious forebears, to the benefit of both their realms?
The queen’s resolution that Philip should be her husband need not, therefore, be seen as the emotional choice of a naïve and inexperienced woman in thrall to the land of her mother’s birth, nor even simply as a mistake. There were good grounds for thinking that he was the best of the limited choices available to her, all of which were problematic in one way or another. That was not the assessment of her councillors, but they had agendas of their own, many of them mutually incompatible, and concerns too about the prospect that the queen might take too independent a view of her own authority. (As the imperial envoys had remarked of the convoluted state of the English court in 1553, Mary had ‘found matters in such a condition when she came to the throne that she cannot possibly put everything straight, or punish all who have been guilty of something, otherwise she would be left without any vassals at all’.)
Meanwhile, Ambassador Renard had every reason to accentuate the queen’s dependence on his own judicious advice when he reported events in England to his master in Brussels. And if Mary was happy at times to present herself as a vulnerably innocent woman, there was often advantage in doing so. Her chaste insistence that she had no personal taste for marriage (‘she had never felt that which was called love, nor harboured thoughts of voluptuousness’) fulfilled valuable political purposes within England. She was married to her kingdom, she was wont to observe with a gesture to her coronation ring, and the accession to the throne of a virgin named Mary had not gone publicly unremarked. Emphasis on her lack of worldly experience also served to justify her resolve that she would only consider a suitor who was personally acceptable to herself. (Courtenay, she maintained, was not – and although she sustained the purity of that verdict by refusing to spend any time with him, she was also proved right very rapidly as his new-found freedom went to his head, revealing alarming deficiencies in his character and judgement.) When, after extensive backstage diplomacy, Philip’s proposal was eventually presented at court in November, Mary acted as though the question were new to her, and consulted her council with ‘becoming modesty, a timid countenance and trembling gestures’. But, however convincing her performance, it was her own plan she put to them, and her own plan that prevailed.
It was noticeable too that the general insistence on her need for a husband to carry out ‘the offices which do not properly belong to woman’s estate’ (‘la profession des dames’, in Renard’s elegant cipher) did not include any further specification of what those offices actually were. Ambassador Michieli, for example, in suggesting that her sex required her ‘to refer many matters to her councillors and ministers’, noted without apparent irony that this was also ‘the custom of other sovereigns’. Outside the council chamber, leadership in war was one obvious example of a role that a queen could not easily fulfil; and this division of labour was vividly depicted in the great seal that was cast in 1554 showing the royal couple on horseback, Mary ahead holding the sceptre and looking back at Philip who rode on her left, the traditional position for a consort, with a great sword unsheathed in his hand. But even this apparently straightforward distinction of function between Mary as a sovereign wife and Philip as her royal husband was fraught with political difficulty, given that the potential benefits of imperial assistance against France and Scotland had to be weighed against the disturbing possibility that England might be drawn into Spain’s military quarrels or made subject to its forces.
In fact, the treaty hammered out to give effect to a marriage that was supposedly made necessary by the limitations of the queen’s sex went to great lengths to prevent her husband from intervening in the government of her kingdom at all. Here the advantages to Mary of a foreign match were once again apparent: if her councillors believed that she could not govern without a husband’s help, it was a principle they were eager to waive if the husband in question were Spanish. Philip would have the title of king in England, but none of the authority. He could assist his wife in the administration of her realm, but only so far as established ‘laws, privileges and customs’ allowed, and he could appoint no officers there. England would take no part in his wars; his wife would not leave her kingdom; and he would have no claim on the throne after her death. Meanwhile, although Philip already had a son by his first, short-lived wife, who would inherit Spain after him, the rich territories of the Netherlands would pass to his future offspring with Mary along with the English crown.
These provisions protected English interests – and the independence of Mary’s sovereignty – so effectively that Philip privately vowed that he held himself bound by none of them. Isabella of Castile’s example was less welcome, it seemed, to her Spanish great-grandson than it was to her English granddaughter. But while private dissent might salve Philip’s pride, it did nothing to prevent the terms of the treaty from passing into English law in parliament in April 1554, along with explicit confirmation that Mary, as ‘sole queen’, should ‘have and enjoy the crown and sovereignty’ in ‘as large and ample manner and form’ after she was married to Philip as she had before. Nor did his objections do anything to compromise the carefully designed ceremonial that attended this momentous royal wedding after his rain-sodden arrival at Southampton on 20 July.
Five days later, the weather had not improved when the wedding party assembled at Winchester’s ancient cathedral, but the absence of sun was offset by the shining cloth of gold in which bride, groom and the church’s vast interior were all lavishly decked. Philip, at twenty-seven, was a languidly inscrutable figure, large of jaw and elegant of dress, who had resigned himself to his father’s plans for this English marriage despite his own profound reservations, both political and personal. His graceful manners betrayed no hint of ungallant thoughts, however, as his bride was escorted to his side, a short, spare woman eleven years his senior, who had once been ‘more than middling fair’, in the Venetian ambassador’s forensic assessment, but whose pale face was now lined ‘more by anxieties than by age’. On the eve of the ceremony, the emperor had made his son a king by giving him the kingdom of Naples, to ensure the parity of the eclectically mingled titles by which the couple were proclaimed once their vows had been made: ‘Philip and Mary, by the grace of God King and Queen of England, France, Naples, Jerusalem and Ireland, Defenders of the Faith, Princes of Spain and Sicily, Archdukes of Austria, Dukes of Milan, Burgundy and Brabant, Counts of Habsburg, Flanders and Tyrol’. Their marriage had therefore bestowed on Mary the title of prince of Spain, just as her husband was king of England; but on English soil, as on their great seal, Philip’s place was on her left, not her right, in subtle ceremonial demonstration that he was her consort, not her sovereign lord.
Mary showed every sign of satisfaction in the marriage she had made. Privately, she was delighted with the courteously attentive husband who would make it possible for her to give her country an heir. Publicly, she had found a spouse whose status outside England was worthy of her own, but whose authority within her realm had been circumscribed almost to nothing. But even as she took her vows, it had already become unsettlingly clear quite how many of her subjects did not share this happy view of her position as a married queen.
For all the uncompromising drafting of her marriage treaty and the legislation that ratified it, for all Mary’s careful distinction between her private duty as a wife and her public responsibility as a monarch, everything that her subjects knew about the relative authority of husband and wife served to fuel fears that her marriage to Philip would subject England to Spanish rule. He was now king of England, and kings, they knew, ruled. Queens, in general, did not. Had that been the only issue, had Mary had time to demonstrate that her own sovereignty was English sovereignty, perhaps those anxieties could have been allayed. But from the moment the Spanish match was first publicly broached, it was conflated in the minds of her subjects with another issue that, for Mary, was a matter not of policy but of divinely ordained truth: the restoration of Catholicism in England.
For the last twenty years, successive waves of religious reform had swept over England, leaving in their wake unpredictable, eddying currents of change in the faith of the English people. England was not straightforwardly a Protestant country; the collapse of Edward VI’s design for a Protestant succession attested to that, and many of Mary’s subjects welcomed her commitment to traditional forms of religious practice. Altars were restored, images were retrieved from their hiding-places, and the notes of the Latin mass once more hung on incense-scented air. Conservative bishops were released from custody, swapping places with the evangelical prelates who had helped to imprison them, and the statutes that had established the reformed Edwardian Church were rolled back one by one in parliament. However, the deepest roots of the English reformation lay not in doctrinal controversy, but in Henry VIII’s insistence that the English Church should have an English head – a matter of jurisdiction that was given extra political ballast by the determination of the great landowners to maintain their property rights under English law over the rich estates they had acquired when England’s monasteries were dissolved. And now the queen’s intention to restore the authority of Rome and her decision to take a Spanish husband were too easily elided into a double-headed spectre of foreign domination.
As early as the winter of 1553, when news of the queen’s proposed marriage to Philip of Spain began to spread among her subjects, a conspiracy was under way – encouraged with partisan enthusiasm by the French ambassador – to defend England’s autonomy by removing Mary from the throne. Beyond that, its aims were sketchy. She might be replaced by Jane Grey, still a prisoner in the Tower, or perhaps by the queen’s rejected suitor Edward Courtenay, better yet if he were to be married to Mary’s sister Elizabeth. Jane Grey’s father, the duke of Suffolk, and Courtenay himself were both involved in the plot, but it was entirely characteristic of both men that lack of competence and loss of nerve rendered them liabilities rather than leaders of resistance. That left Sir Thomas Wyatt, a gentleman of Kent, who, alone among the conspirators, had succeeded in raising three thousand men in his home county. And at the end of January 1554, the scale of the threat that Wyatt’s men represented became unnervingly clear when a London militia sent to confront them at Rochester was routed, with many troops deserting the militia’s ranks to join the rebels.
Suddenly, the capital itself was in danger. Once again, Mary was required to show that a queen could lead her people in time of crisis, and once again she demonstrated her mastery of her role. She would not leave London (unlike the imperial ambassadors, who wrote with an unmistakable note of panic to ask the emperor if ‘there is anything to be gained by our staying here longer’), and she would not ask Charles V to send soldiers onto English soil, provocatively counter-productive as that would be. Instead, she rode with her councillors to the Guildhall in the heart of the city to speak to London’s citizens.
Six months earlier, she had rallied her supporters against Queen Jane with an address, one eulogising eyewitness said, ‘of Herculean rather than of womanly daring’. Now she combined Tudor charisma with the surest of political touches to denounce Wyatt and to declare her dedication to her realm, playing as she did so on her double identity as a sovereign and a woman. She showed the people her coronation ring, the ‘spousal ring’ signifying her marriage to her kingdom, which never, she told them, left her finger. And she was not only a sovereign wife: ‘On the word of a prince,’ she went on,
I cannot tell how naturally the mother loves the child, for I was never the mother of any. But certainly, if a prince and governor may as naturally and earnestly love her subjects as the mother does love the child, then assure yourselves that I, being your lady and mistress, do as earnestly and tenderly love and favour you.
When Wyatt’s assault finally came, in the night of 6 February, the queen stood firm as arrows rattled the windows of the palace of Westminster. By morning, the revolt had collapsed.
The conspiracy sealed the fate of those who posed a direct threat to Mary’s regime. On 12 February, Jane Grey was led to the scaffold within the precincts of the Tower, the fortress from which she had not emerged after her proclamation as queen seven months earlier. With extraordinary composure, she admitted her fault in accepting the crown, but ‘touching the procurement and desire thereof by me or on my behalf,’ she said, ‘I do wash my hands in innocency’. Her women tied a blindfold over her eyes to shield her from the sight of the axe, and in a moment of terrible pathos she groped for the block, crying, ‘Where is it? What shall I do?’ They guided her gently forward, and, with one final prayer, she knelt to meet her death. It caused little stir among the people who had so briefly – and unexpectedly, on both sides – been her subjects. Edward Courtenay re-entered the Tower on the same day that Jane Grey died. He remained a prisoner for a year, before being sent into an exile from which he was never allowed to return. Princess Elizabeth had had the characteristic wit to do nothing other than wait and watch when she learned of Wyatt’s plans, but that suspicious inactivity was enough to persuade her sister that she too should now be accommodated, temporarily at least, within the Tower’s walls.
The events of February 1554 were an emphatic demonstration of both the vulnerabilities and the strengths of Mary’s authority. Wyatt himself insisted before he lost his head that he had acted to prevent the queen’s marriage from delivering England into ‘bondage and servitude by aliens and strangers’. But the queen herself – plausibly enough, given the identity of the plotters and Wyatt’s previous service to her brother’s regime – interpreted the rebellion as the work of traitorous Protestants, thereby reinforcing the identification between religious and political anxieties about her government. How complex those anxieties were was indicated by a further statute enacted by the parliament of April 1554, to accompany those concerning the queen’s forthcoming marriage: ‘An act’, the rolls of parliament recorded, ‘declaring that the regal power of this realm is in the queen’s majesty as fully and absolutely as ever it was in any her most noble progenitors, kings of this realm’. The perceived need for a law to spell out the fact that a female monarch ruled by the same authority as a male might appear to suggest weakness in Mary’s position; but there are indications that the act was framed in response to efforts by some of her more fervent Catholic supporters to argue over-zealously for the strength of her powers. She was not bound, they said, by any of England’s laws made since the Conquest – and could therefore choose to sweep away the entire apparatus of the reformation at will – because all previous statutes had been made in the name of England’s king, while its queen was nowhere mentioned.
Her marriage to Philip therefore exposed her rule to persistent charges that she was handing England into the control of Rome and Spain. Philip’s Spanish entourage, who complained of the ceremonial ‘slights’ that indicated his subordinate status as her consort, were presumably unconvinced of the latter, but Mary’s concern to honour her husband by associating his name with hers in all her public pronouncements fed sinister suspicions among her English subjects about the extent of his control over their queen. For the Spanish, the lack of a coronation for King Philip was a cause of bitter resentment; for the English, rumours that his coronation was imminent, along with the enhanced authority it was assumed to confer, became a mainstay of propaganda disseminated by those who opposed Mary’s policies – and their number was increasing, once the reinstatement of the old heresy laws meant that obdurate Protestants began to die in Catholic flames.
Meanwhile, the queen’s decision that she could marry only a man of an equivalent dignity to her own inevitably meant that the husband whom her subjects feared was dominating her government could not be constantly at her side. Philip had royal responsibilities outside England, not least his father’s wars against France, and although he stayed at Mary’s court for thirteen months after their sumptuous wedding, it was another nineteen months after that before he returned. For all the talk of female incapacity, the overriding compulsion behind Mary’s marriage had not been the deficiencies of her sex but her need for an heir. Time was already against her, and Philip’s absence did nothing to improve her chances of bearing a child.
There was still hope, however, despite the toll taken on her health as well as her looks by the strain under which she had lived for so long. Contemporaries were quick to ascribe the apparent delicacy of her constitution to classically ‘hysterical’ causes: she suffered from ‘menstruous retention and suffocation of the womb’, Ambassador Michieli reported, a condition for which she was regularly bled – resulting, he said, in her characteristic pallor and thinness – and which rendered her vulnerable to bouts of melancholy and weeping. But it is clear that this, like other aspects of her feminine ‘weakness’, could be useful to Mary when she chose. The queen ‘had pretended to be ill for the last two days’, she told Renard in the autumn of 1553, ‘but her illness was really the travail that this decision’ – her resolution to marry Philip – ‘had cost her’. And she was robust enough to enjoy dancing and hunting, and to stand strong against her enemies when her rights were challenged (‘She is brave and valiant’, observed Michieli generously, ‘unlike other timid and spiritless women…’).
Within four months of her wedding, it seemed as though her prayers had been answered. It was not easy to be confident of the early symptoms of pregnancy, and the difficulty was compounded many times over for a woman who had experienced menstrual problems, but by 28 November 1554 the queen had allowed herself to be convinced by her doctors’ diagnosis that God had blessed her marriage and her realm. That was the day when papal authority was restored at last in England (her subjects having insisted on prior confirmation that the pope would not disturb their possession of formerly monastic estates) – and, to Mary’s joy, it was proclaimed in providential conjunction with the future of the Catholic succession. The queen was ‘quick with child’, the royal letters said, while bells were rung and Te Deums sung. Meanwhile, hastily arranged negotiations produced a fraught parliamentary agreement that, in the grudgingly acknowledged interests of stability, Philip would become regent on behalf of the infant heir should Mary not survive the birth of their baby.
By Easter 1555 England expected the arrival of its heir with anxious anticipation. The queen, slowed now by her growing girth, had withdrawn into confinement at Hampton Court, attended by her devoted ladies-in-waiting in warm rooms muffled with rich carpets and tapestries, where an exquisitely carved cradle stood ready beside her bed. On 30 April, when word reached London of the birth of a healthy prince, the city erupted in celebration. But it was rumour, running wilder than the bonfires in the streets, and it was quickly denied. May came and went, dates were recalculated. In early July, without fanfare or comment, the queen began receiving visits from male councillors and ambassadors once again, and by the end of the month little doubt remained that she was not, after all, pregnant. God’s blessing, it seemed, had been deferred.
Mary was by no means the only woman to have endured a phantom pregnancy. Twenty years earlier the wife of the governor of Calais, who also had a cradle waiting empty, was consolingly reminded that ‘your ladyship is not the first woman of honour that has overshot or mistaken your time and reckoning’. But the political consequences of the queen’s failure to produce a child, and the public humiliation to which she was exposed, were much greater than any other woman had to endure. Philip, who had waited in England to be by Mary’s side after the delivery that never was, sailed away from Greenwich on 29 August, waving his hat in salute to his wife until he was out of view. The Venetian ambassador gave the doge a fulsome account of the ‘flood of tears’ to which the queen gave way once she was alone; how he knew of this emotional collapse remained unexplained, especially since he later admitted that many months had passed since he had been granted the honour of a royal audience. Publicly, it was with a regal grandeur more unfathomable than ever that the queen returned to the hours she spent at her duties and her devotions.
Philip eventually returned to his wife’s kingdom for a three-month visit in March 1557, and in January of the following year Mary announced the good news that she was seven months pregnant – ‘which has given me greater joy than I can express’, her husband wrote with formal courtesy, ‘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 our realm’. The queen had waited so long before speaking of her condition, she explained, to be sure that this time she was indeed carrying a baby. But no elaborate preparations were made for her confinement, and although she made a will at the end of March 1558 – ‘thinking myself to be with child’, and ‘foreseeing the great danger which by God’s ordinance remain to all women in their travail of children’ – she did not go into labour. By May the subject was no longer mentioned.
Despite all her hopes, her marriage had not emulated the success of the union of her grandparents Isabella and Ferdinand. Married at eighteen, Isabella had given birth to six children, while Mary, a bride at thirty-eight, had none. The Catholic monarchs of Aragon and Castile had united their realms to drive out the hea-then Moors, but in Mary’s kingdom the stench of burning Protestant flesh now served to deepen religious division. And England could look only with envy at the geographical strength achieved by the alliance of the Spanish kingdoms. By the summer of 1557, despite Mary’s attempts to act as a peacemaker, England had – as Wyatt and others had feared – been drawn into the Empire’s war with France. And in January 1558 the unthinkable news had come that Calais, the garrisoned port that had been the last English foothold on the continent for the past hundred years, had fallen to the French.
By the spring of that year, a queen alone at the age of forty-two, Mary was resigned to the absence of her husband and facing the certainty that she would not carry an heir. That prospect, Renard had warned after the debacle of her first pregnancy, meant ‘trouble on so great a scale that the pen can hardly set it down. Certain it is that the order of succession has been so badly decided that the Lady Elizabeth comes next, and that means heresy again, and the true religion overthrown.’ The queen did not want Elizabeth to inherit her crown, but nor could she bring herself to dispose of her half-sister. Mary’s own favoured heir was her reliably Catholic cousin Margaret Douglas, the handsome daughter of Henry VIII’s elder sister Margaret by her stormy second marriage, to whom she had been close since girlhood. But it could hardly have escaped the queen’s attention that, by the precedent of her own victory over Jane Grey, Elizabeth’s claim would in turn be irresistible. Mary herself drew an absolute distinction between the legitimacy of her own birth and the bastardy of her sister, but she was enough her father’s daughter to know that the power of his bloodline was likely to prevail. All she could hope was that she would live long enough to prevent Elizabeth from uprooting the Catholicism she had so faithfully and forcefully replanted in her kingdom.
In that, too, she would be disappointed. During the summer of 1558, a lethal epidemic of influenza took hold of England. The new disease did not strike quickly, like the plague or the sweat. Instead, protracted, repeated fevers laid thousands low, and many did not rise again from their beds. That autumn, the queen was among them. In the first week of November, knowing by then that she was not expected to survive, she sent to acknowledge Elizabeth as her heir, asking only that her sister should fulfil the terms of her will and maintain ‘the old religion as the queen has restored it’. She held on for ten more days, drifting in and out of consciousness, consoled by visions, she told her closest friend among her ladies, of angelic children singing and playing around her. In the early morning of 17 November, mass was celebrated at her bedside before she finally slipped away.
Soon the road north from London to Hatfield, where Mary’s sister waited for news, was crowded with the great men of the realm hastening to offer their allegiance to England’s new queen.