5
FOR THE FIRST time in her life free to make her own decisions, Mary might be forgiven for thinking that she was making her own choice of husband, but in this she was the dupe of her powerful Habsburg relative, the Emperor Charles.
From the moment Mary so unexpectedly won the crown, Charles was determined to marry her to his son, Prince Philip of Spain. He knew that the English would not swallow a Catholic revival and a Spanish marriage all at once, so he was prepared to stymie the first in order to advance the second. Whatever Mary might fondly imagine, Charles was essentially secular and pragmatic. The re-conversion of England could wait. The Pope must be persuaded that the time was not propitious for reconciliation and the papal legate, Cardinal Pole, physically restrained from crossing to England until Charles had accomplished his prior purpose. Nothing was more important than grasping this opportunity to bring England within the Habsburg fold. The perpetual enemy, France, would be encircled and there would be a clear sea route for the transportation of bullion and troops from Spain to the Low Countries.
Over the years, Mary the beleaguered princess had come to rely on Charles’s ambassadors to offer her advice and support. They were often her only friends. It was not surprising, therefore, that she formed an immediate dependence on the Imperial envoy, Simon Renard, who was given secret, unofficial access, even smuggling himself into the palace in disguise at all hours. As she was Queen, Mary’s natural advisers should have been her counsellors, but she did not feel comfortable with them. They were a large, unwieldy body, drawn from her household officers and the men who had rushed to support her against Northumberland, with the addition of twenty experienced men who had actually served in government. Mary never really liked or trusted the latter. Living very much in the past, she remembered how they had turned their coats in her father’s and brother’s reigns, or supported Northumberland in his recent takeover attempt, and she regarded most of them as traitors and heretics. Nevertheless, she recognized that she needed their expertise.
As the Council was so large and unwieldy, riddled with mutual resentment and divisions, all important business was transacted by an inner core, the key players being Stephen Gardiner, as Lord Chancellor, and William, Lord Paget – who hated each other – Arundel, and Sir William Petre, as principal secretary, but even then Mary had difficulty managing it.
What mattered was that the various members of the Council were loyal to the sovereign, whatever their personal differences, but Mary seems to have been unable to cope with even a normal level of argument. Having spent so many of her adult years in retirement, she suddenly found herself with the unaccustomed burden of office and it was onerous. She had had no training for the role of sole queen, nor had she any real political experience. She was intelligent and hardworking, a capable linguist who could communicate with foreign ambassadors in Latin or their native tongues, but she was not an original or incisive thinker and lacked imagination. A picture emerges of a conscientious and well-meaning woman, not really up to the task, and unable to prioritize.
The Venetian Soranzo reported that Mary was not strong, that she suffered from headaches and palpitations of the heart, and that she constantly had to take medicine and be blooded. She was probably anaemic. ‘She is of very spare diet, and never eats until 1 or 2pm, although she rises at daybreak, when, after saying her prayers and hearing Mass in private, she transacts business incessantly, until after midnight, when she retires to rest.’ It was a long day, ‘for she chooses to give audience not only to all the members of her Privy Council, and to hear from them every detail of public business, but also to all other persons who ask it of her’.
Mary found it so much easier to decide policy on a one-to-one basis with Simon Renard, who was always so sympathetic, telling her what she wanted to hear. He began to behave as if he were the Queen’s natural and proper adviser, exploiting her trust and dependence on the Emperor to insinuate himself into her confidence, skilfully playing on her fears and prejudices, and undermining the mutual trust that should have existed between the Queen and her Council, whose role Renard never really understood. Charles was sensitive to the need for Mary to play down her Imperial connection, recommending exactly the opposite course of action from the one Renard was encouraging: ‘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 and, as far as it shall appear requisite, of Parliament itself.’
Renard’s brief was to probe Mary’s mind on the question of marriage and to implant the idea of Philip as the ideal candidate. He obviously read her well, because he began by appealing to her sense of helplessness as a woman:
Your Majesty could but be mindful of the fact that a great part of the labour of government could with difficulty be undertaken by a woman, and was not within woman’s province, and also that it was important that the Queen should be assisted, protected and comforted in the discharge of those duties. Your Majesty [Charles] therefore considered that she would do well to entertain the idea of marriage, and to fix on some suitable match as soon as possible. If she wished to inform Your Majesty before coming to a definite decision, you would give your opinion, with the sincere and more than paternal affection you had always shown her, on that and on all other matters on which she might desire to consult you.
After a lifetime in which marriage had often been tantalizingly close, yet elusive, it must have been pleasurable for Mary to contemplate that it was hers for the asking, even though by the standards of the time she was well into middle age. Her answer was suitably coy. ‘As for the suggestion of marriage, she declared she had never thought of wedding before she was Queen, and called God to witness that as a private individual she would never have desired it, but preferred to end her days in chastity.’ However, she was determined to follow the Emperor’s advice and ‘choose whosoever you might recommend; for after God she desired to obey none but your Majesty, whom she regarded as a father.’
She felt confident that the Emperor would remember she was ‘thirty-seven years of age, and would not urge her to come to a decision before having seen the person and heard him speak, for as she was marrying against her private inclination she trusted your Majesty would give her a suitable match’. Of course, her request to inspect the candidate was no more practical than her father’s had been when he asked Francis I to bring a batch of French princesses to Calais for him to make his choice.
In October Renard had a meeting with the Queen at Whitehall Palace, ‘entering it by the gallery on the river Thames; and she came up so close to me that I was able to deliver your Majesty’s letters to her without being seen by those who were in the same room’. Mary plied him with questions about her intended bridegroom. She was worried about his youth, as she was eleven years older. ‘If he were disposed to be amorous, such was not her desire,’ she confided, ‘for she never harboured thoughts of love.’ Renard hastened to assure her that Philip was already ‘middle aged’, and the father of a son; it was better that she should marry a younger man who would give her children and live long enough to see them grow up. He dispelled her doubts as to Philip’s popularity with his subjects in the Low Countries, dismissing the rumour ‘of his excessive pride and small wisdom’ and emphasizing his virtues.
Mary had not completely lost her head. Perhaps recalling what her mother had told her about her grandmother, Queen Isabella, she indicated that she had no intention of yielding sovereignty to her husband. ‘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 assured Renard, ‘but if he wished to encroach in the government of the kingdom she would be unable to permit it, nor if he attempted to fill posts and offices with strangers, for the country itself would never stand such interference.’
She ended the interview bemoaning the difficulty of reaching a decision, especially as she was doing so without the advice of her Council, yet by the end of the month Renard had his answer. He reported triumphantly to Charles that the Queen had sent for him to her chamber. There was no one else in the room but Susan Clarencieux, Mary’s favourite attendant. The Queen confessed that she had been confined to her room feigning illness for two days while she tried to make up her mind. She had hardly slept, spending the time weeping and praying. As usual the Holy Sacrament was on an altar in the room and Mary asked Renard and Mrs Clarencieux to kneel with her and recite Veni Creator Spiritus.
Now Mary was sure that she was making the right decision. ‘She felt inspired by God, who had performed so many miracles in her favour, to give me her promise to marry his Highness there before the Holy Sacrament, and her mind, once made up, would never change, but she would love him perfectly and never give him cause to be jealous.’
It had been inevitable that she would choose Philip. Other contenders for her hand – her old suitor Dom Luiz of Portugal and the Archduke Ferdinand of Austria, for instance – would have been less controversial, but Charles himself had played a duplicitous role in heading off these suits in favour of his son. The possession of England would strengthen Philip’s hold on the Low Countries and perhaps advance his candidacy for the Imperial crown after Charles’s retirement; the Spanish Habsburgs would thereby retain seniority over the Austrian branch of the family.
Then there were the English candidates: young Edward Courtenay, Earl of Devonshire, the ‘last sprig of the White Rose’, and Reginald Pole, who although a cardinal had only taken deacon’s orders, leaving him free to marry. Like Mary, Courtenay was a great-grandchild of Edward IV, while Pole was Edward IV’s great-nephew, the grandson of his brother Clarence. To Mary, there was no contest. Renard had shrewdly appealed to her pride in her Spanish royal blood, guessing that she would consider it beneath her to marry a mere subject. As heir to the Spanish crown, its colonies in the New World, the Low Countries, Naples and Sicily, Philip was, quite simply, the best match in Europe. It remained to convince her Council and the people.
Playing on Mary’s pride again, Renard expressed surprise that she should concern herself with what the Council thought about her choice of husband. He knew he had the support of Paget, a career politician with no firm religious convictions, who believed that England needed the Imperial alliance. But the Lord Chancellor, Gardiner, was vigorously opposed to the Spanish marriage. As a Catholic patriot he feared and hated the political influence of foreigners, believing that England should and could stand alone, without coming down on either the Imperialist or the French side. If England returned to Rome and re-established the old religion, Gardiner unrealistically believed, the country’s ills would be solved. He immediately identified the weakest spot in Renard’s argument: the Emperor’s hypocrisy about his real motives in suggesting the marriage. By marrying Philip Mary would involve England in the Habsburgs’ everlasting strife with France and invite the French to intrigue with English heretics. The Emperor would do better to be satisfied with England’s good will, he maintained, without seeking an alliance through marriage.
Gardiner wanted Mary to marry the English candidate, Courtenay, whom he had grown fond of during the long years of imprisonment in the Tower. Mary tartly responded that she did not see why she should marry a man just because Gardiner had enjoyed his company in prison. Besides, although Courtenay’s mother, Gertrude, Marchioness of Exeter, was a dear friend and the Queen’s bedfellow, Mary did not like the young man. Outwardly charming and good-looking, he was already revealing himself to be dissolute, reckless and unreliable; he would be easy prey to the machinations of others.
That the Queen should rule alone, without a husband, was anathema. There was also the question of the succession. Validating Katherine of Aragon’s marriage and her own legitimacy in Parliament had reopened in Mary all the wounds of the past. She had already admitted to Renard that ‘it would burden her conscience too heavily’ to allow that sly heretic Elizabeth, the daughter of the infamous whore Anne Boleyn, to succeed her. Was Elizabeth even her father’s daughter, she asked, or had she been fathered by the musician Mark Smeaton, whom Mary in her bitterest moments fancied she resembled? It was imperative, therefore, that the Queen should marry and have a child of her own.
What she had not anticipated was that Parliament would send a delegation of twenty MPs to the palace to protest against her choice. When the Speaker argued against a foreign match Mary lost her temper, angrily shouting at them in her deep, masculine voice that ‘Parliament was not accustomed to use such language to the kings of England.’ She knew her duty to the country, but ‘if she were married against her will she would not live three months, and would have no children, wherefore the Speaker would be defeating his own ends.’ The delegation returned to Parliament empty-handed.
Never before had a Tudor ruler flouted popular opinion as expressed in Parliament so openly and at the same time so inexpertly. Powerless for so much of her life, Mary was now using her power unwisely, intent on having her own way. Successful sovereignty depends on the ability to listen and to conduct a dialogue with the people. No matter how autocratic her father had been, he had always been able to read the public mind and known when to give way, or appear to give way. National opposition to the Spanish match was not scotched by Mary’s dismissal of Parliament’s concerns, but driven underground and intensified.
The level of anti-Spanish sentiment ignited by news of the impending marriage took the Queen and the Imperialists by surprise. Spain, and more especially its territories in the Low Countries, had long been England’s allies, but xenophobia was rife in Henry VIII’s post-Reformation island empire. When the Emperor’s ambassadors arrived to discuss the marriage treaty, the people made their disapproval felt. Small boys pelted them with snowballs and the crowd was sullen. Of course, the French ambassador, Antoine de Noailles, was playing a major role in fanning discontent, but the more militant Protestant propaganda machine was also at work, spreading alarmist rumours that the Spanish were coming to take over and that England would be forced back into subservience to the Pope.
The opponents of the marriage – Gardiner’s faction in the Council and the parliamentary majority; a party of discontented nobles, including Lords Suffolk, Northampton, Pembroke, Clinton and the former adherents of Northumberland; and a handful of restless and adventurous knights and gentlemen – were motivated by patriotism rather than Protestantism. A series of popular risings was planned and organized, to be led by Sir Peter Carew and Edward Courtenay in the South-west, Sir James Crofts on the Welsh border, the Duke of Suffolk in the Midlands, and Sir Thomas Wyatt in Kent. Palm Sunday in mid March was set as the date for revolt, but leaks and the likelihood of discovery provoked the conspirators into premature action – rather as Renard, who had learned of the plot, intended.
The general aim of the conspirators seems to have been to depose Mary in favour of Elizabeth, who was to marry Courtenay. Renard, forever poisoning Mary’s mind about Elizabeth – she was greatly to be feared, he warned, as she has power of enchantment – fuelled her suspicions that her sister was plotting against her. If Elizabeth knew about the plot, she was not necessarily implicated. There seems to be no doubt that the conspirators had been in touch, at least with senior members of her household, suggesting that she take up residence at her castle of Donnington. Elizabeth might well have been minded to do so, since Donnington could be more easily defended than Ashridge, where she was currently living. Mary fired her first shot across the bows by inviting Elizabeth to court for her own safety, rather than go to Donnington, ‘whither, as we are informed, you are minded to remove’. Elizabeth declined the invitation, which convinced the sceptics that she must be guilty.
Only Wyatt’s section of the planned revolt, in Kent, took off. The royal forces sent to defeat him joined him. Mary had no other army to interpose between Wyatt and his 3,000 followers as he approached the capital. As ever when personal courage was required, she rose to the occasion magnificently, riding with a train of lords and ladies from Westminster to Guildhall, to address the citizens with surprising eloquence. Her presence and oratory turned the tables on the rebels.
She began by appealing to the Londoners as their ‘Queen and mother’, ‘not for having borne you as my children, but full of more than motherly love towards you since the day in which you chose me as your Queen and mistress.’ They had chosen her as their queen, she continued, yet Wyatt was trying to depose her. Wyatt was not only going to take the Tower of London and the treasure of the kingdom, but he also had his eye on their personal wealth.
Her sole aim, she told them, was for the peace and tranquillity of the kingdom. Yes, a marriage was under discussion, but the matter was being decided by her counsellors, ‘outstanding for their prudence and experience’, and it would take place only if it was for England’s good. ‘I shall be pleased to submit the whole matter to Parliament, which should be called at an early date,’ she promised. ‘And should it not be recognized that the reasons which have induced myself and the Council to negotiate the marriage with the powerful Prince of Spain, are to the advantage of my kingdom and of the welfare of you all, I shall willingly refrain from pursuing it.’
She was not marrying for her own benefit, but for the good of her kingdom. She had spent most of her life unmarried, and would prefer to remain so, rather than provoke bloodshed in her kingdom. ‘That being my mind and firm determination, I earnestly beg you, my beloved subjects, to openly state if I may expect from you loyalty and obedience, or if you will join the party of the nefarious traitor against me, your Queen.’
It was stirring stuff, if duplicitous. She was determined on the marriage, and nothing would dissuade her. Four days later she was telling Renard that she ‘considered herself his Highness’s wife, that she would never take another husband, and would rather lose her crown, her realm and her life’. The speech did the trick, however, inspiring London’s trained bands to defend the City against the rebels.
When Wyatt and his force of 3,000 reached Southwark, he found London Bridge closed, with cannon pointed towards him. For three days he lingered on the south bank, before marching his troops west to Kingston, where he was able to cross the Thames and approach London through Knight’s Bridge. As he neared St James’s Park he made the fatal decision of splitting his force. The greater part continued north of St James’s Palace and on to the City, while the rest made its way south of the royal hunting ground, to Westminster. The old leper hospital of St James’s was Mary’s favourite palace, but, refusing to take refuge in the Tower, she had stationed herself at Whitehall. As Wyatt’s men approached, the royal guards in the outer defences panicked and retreated inside the gates. Mary remained undaunted, as palace officials and her ladies ran back and forth screaming. Her guards might be cowards, but Mary was prepared to stand her ground.
The rebels failed to take advantage of the disarray, continuing east, intent on taking the Tower. There were skirmishes at Temple Bar and along Fleet Street. Finally, Wyatt came to Ludgate, but could gain no admittance to the City. Realizing at last that he was beaten, he surrendered. Under torture, he refused to implicate Elizabeth, who was nevertheless brought to London for questioning. Wyatt was tried and executed, exonerating Elizabeth on the scaffold.
Renard was pressuring Mary to do away with Elizabeth, maintaining that she presented too much of a threat to Philip’s safety to allow Philip to enter England. Whatever her personal inclination, Mary was insistent that her sister should be dealt with strictly according to law. Since no member of the Privy Council was willing to be responsible for Elizabeth, holding her in custody, she was taken to the Tower. By this time, it was clear that nothing could be proved against her. Later, John Foxe’s emotive account of Elizabeth’s arrival at the Tower – in which she prefers to sit outside in the rain rather than enter ‘a worse place’, where she is sure to meet her death – made good Protestant propaganda at a time when Mary’s reputation was being blackened.
Fatally, Mary believed that her victory over Wyatt was a sign that God approved of her marriage. The rebellion reinforced the idea in her and Gardiner’s minds that heresy, not patriotism, was the prime root of sedition in England. It gave Gardiner the motive to hurry forward the religious programme he had long been advocating, restoring the heresy laws in order to stamp it out. He believed that unless the old religion were firmly re-established before the marriage took place, the people would say that Catholicism was being reintroduced in the wake of Spanish domination. It was not a policy the secular Paget could condone and their quarrel spilled over on to the floor of the House of Lords – an unforgivable loss of control on the part of the executive, the Queen.
Treason was never condoned in Tudor England, but Wyatt had become something of a popular hero. The hundred-odd rebels who followed him to their deaths in the spring of 1554 were easily confused in the popular memory with the nearly 300 martyrs who were burned for their religious beliefs in succeeding years. Those who exhorted Bishop Latimer to courage at the stake and thrilled to his dying words perhaps remembered Wyatt’s execution, when the onlookers had pushed forward to dip their handkerchiefs in his blood.
Henry VIII’s breach with Rome had laid the foundation for that confusion of Protestantism with nationalism which would be such a prominent characteristic of Elizabeth’s reign, but the process was greatly accelerated during the months following Wyatt’s rebellion, when the clergy were talking about reviving the statutes against heresy and the executioners were exhibiting the severed heads and dismembered corpses of the rebels all over London – in the suburbs of Bermondsey and Southwark, at Leadenhall and Cheapside, Charing Cross and Tyburn. In the minds of many of Mary’s subjects, Spain and Catholicism would soon be fused into a single symbol of horror.