Tudor Lives: Success & Failure of an Age Read online

  ‘As soon as the news of her subscription arrived, incredible joy was shown in all the Court.’ The Lady Mary—as she was now called—was re-united with her father and his new Queen; for the remaining ten years of Henry’s reign she lived peacefully enough on the sidelines of the court. She was no longer a threat to the King’s policy; in 1536 he had put down the rebellious Catholics of the Pilgrimage of Grace; in October 1537 the succession was secured by the birth of his long-awaited son. He could now recognize his eldest child and allow his natural generosity to reign. He gave her a household of forty-two people, and a decent allowance to which he added presents of cash from time to time. Her well-kept accounts are the best record of her daily life.

  Having leisure, security and an energetic mind, Mary returned to her studies. A French visitor spoke of her new interest in mathematics, physics and astronomy, besides further studies in the classics, history and languages. She wrote a little, both prose and poetry, and did it competently. Three Latin prayers of hers survive, and also a translation from Erasmus; a lighter Ballade mentioned by Cromwell unfortunately has not survived. She practised her music. Like her father in his youth, she was very active, a great walker and a great rider despite her small, frail body. She was a sociable young woman; indeed, observers at court noted that her little sister Elizabeth was the reserved, contained one, while Mary was jolly. She liked dancing and had her father’s appetite for gambling; cards, bowls, riding, any sport was fit for a wager, an indulgence that often strained her budget.

  She was both generous and affectionate. Her account books record the presents she gave, not only the gifts to the members of the royal family and to the courtiers, but also the kind offerings to the poor and the humble: 20s. to London prisoners, 15s. to an ill child, 8s. 6d. ‘to my Lord Marquess’s servant for singing’, 20d. ‘for bringing unto my Lady’s Grace bacon and eggs’, and a shilling for a poor woman bringing apples. To Elizabeth and little Edward she appeared to be all that an elder sister should be. ‘My sister Elizabeth’, she assured Henry, ‘is in good health and, thanks be to our Lord, such a child toward as I doubt not your Highness shall have cause to rejoice of in time coming.’ When Elizabeth suffered from Henry’s neglect, following the execution of her mother, Mary helped her as best she could from her allowance. And Mary doted on her little brother Edward, showering him with the affection that she might have given to her own children had she been blessed with any. Edward responded with a devotion of his own, declaring to her in Latin: ‘I love you as much as a brother may love his dearest sister.’ Even when the serious youth became a strong Protestant he still preferred his gay eldest sister, though he deplored her Catholicism. With Henry’s succession of queens, also, Mary was on good terms. She had a short-lived quarrel with Catherine Howard, but Anne of Cleves and Catherine Parr remained her friends whatever the circumstances at court.

  Henry died in January 1547. For the last years of his reign Mary had carefully avoided all interference with politics and religious strife. She was silent when her friends were exiled or executed. When her oldest and dearest companion, the aged Countess of Salisbury, was hacked to death by a bungling executioner, Mary was so ill the doctors feared for her life, but she said nothing. Henry had left the doctrine of his English faith Catholic in most essentials, but with the coming of young Edward VI the Protestant party had their moment and seized it. The practice of the Mass was ridiculed; priests were attacked at the altar; a dead cat was tonsured, dressed in robes and nailed to a board with the Host in its paws. The Catholic Lord Chancellor was dismissed and Gardiner and Bonner, the most Catholic of Henry’s bishops, were imprisoned. In 1549 an Act of Uniformity forbade the sacrifice of the Mass and based worship on Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer. The penalties for non-conformity were mild enough, but the Protector and the Council had the difficult task of persuading Mary, newly restored as heiress to the throne under the terms of Henry’s will, to conform to an Act of Parliament.

  The new rulers had neither the authority nor the iron will of the old King, and they faced also a rather different woman from the lonely, inexperienced twenty-year-old who had given way before her father’s tyranny. In 1549 Mary was thirty-three, with her title and position confirmed and her income secured. The battle of wills with Henry had tempered her resolution which was, in the manner of all Tudors, already very strong. Her mind had never been flexible; she was on the way to becoming something of an old maid, and her principles were firmly set. Moreover, Henry’s faith had been Catholic at heart while Edward’s was distinctly Protestant. The ordinary Englishman might, as a cynical foreigner observed, become Moslem or Jew at the King’s bidding, but Mary had suffered one great defeat on the cause of religion and was not likely to deny her faith a second time.

  She told the Protector in peremptory terms that she could have nothing to do with laws ‘against the custom of all Christendom, and in my conscience against the law of God and his Church, which passeth all the rest’. And neither Protector Somerset nor his successor Warwick could move her despite blackmail, threats and the intimidation of her retainers. Warwick had her priests and chief officials imprisoned, and caused the young Protestant King to worry Mary with orders to amend her religion. Despite her reverence for monarchy, her sisterly love, and her sorrow for her servants, she replied that ‘her faith she would not change, nor dissemble her opinion with contrary doings’. The persecution of Mary only ceased in March 1551 when the Emperor Charles, as Edward’s Journal recorded, threatened war if his cousin were not left alone. She was then allowed to hear Mass in private.

  The licence given to Mary was not extended to other subjects, for in Edward’s reign England went steadily Protestant. In 1552 Parliament approved the second Prayer Book and the Forty-two Articles of Cranmer, which he vainly hoped would lead to ‘concord and quietness’ in religion. This was not so, and in the same year another Act of Uniformity made stiff penalties for attendance at Mass, and also stripped the churches of their idolatrous Catholic riches—jewels, plate, robes, crosses, all gold and silver—for the benefit of the government which was hard pressed by debt. The conjunction between a stern Protestantism and a corrupt administration made all Catholics and many moderate men of no great religious feeling look to Mary as the hope for the future, to introduce civic peace, traditional ways and good government. On 6th July 1553 young King Edward died of tuberculosis; he left a worried land, burdened with debt, anxiously feeling the pulls of France and Spain, and unresolved in religion. And waiting to take the advantage of the times was the corrupt adventurer Warwick, lately made Duke of Northumberland, but with his eye on a greater place. Northumberland’s conspiracy to place his daughter-in-law Lady Jane Grey on the throne failed. His callous double-dealing was so well known that none could trust him, and his only hope lay in surprise; even the Protestants, whom he claimed to represent, hated him. In the crisis Mary acted with prudence and courage. She boldly proclaimed herself Queen, and then, with only a few followers, avoided Northumberland’s soldiers until the country rose and acclaimed her. On 19th July the danger was over; the bells began to peal and rang until ten at night, and a mighty Te Deum thundered out from St Paul’s. ‘God so turned the hearts of the people to her and against the Council’, her greatest enemy John Knox admitted, ‘that she overcame them without bloodshed notwithstanding there was made great expedition against her both by sea and land.’

  Hardly ever had an English sovereign come to the throne amid so much rejoicing. ‘Money was thrown out of the windows for joy. The bonfires were without number.’ ‘Yet are we comforted again’, wrote a balladeer:

  Lift up, and eke erect:

  By cause the Lord hath placed thus

  His chosen and elect.

  London was deafened by the cheering, the dancing, the feasting, the crackling of bonfires and the jangle of the bells. And the reign began well. To the members of the conspiracy Mary was lenient to a fault. Northumberland, two or three notorious ringleaders, and eventually Lady Jane, the innocent vict
im of Northumberland’s ambition, were executed; but several members of the Council, equally implicated in the plot, were not only forgiven but also reinstated in office. She was not vengeful or vindictive; political terrorism, as used by all other Tudors, was never one of her weapons. When Elizabeth dabbled in Wyatt’s rebellion, Mary refused to execute or banish her; Elizabeth, in her turn, did not make the same mistake with Mary Stuart. But for all that the new Queen was a Tudor. She intended to rule in the autocratic manner of her family.

  Though she made it known immediately that her mind was ‘stayed in matters of religion’, and though it was not in her nature to compromise with what she considered to be heresy, she began with soft words on religion, calling for an end to back-biting and argument. This policy had been the advice of the wily Charles V to whom, as usual, she turned for wisdom. The choice of adviser was ominous, for it showed that Mary, contrary to the most powerful instinct of Tudor England, was prepared to allow a foreigner to have a hand in English affairs. And the fears of the country were confirmed when Parliament tried to oppose the negotiations for her marriage to Philip of Spain; she angrily interrupted the Commons and rebuked them for their audacity.

  The product of nationalism is usually a hatred for foreigners, and this was so in Tudor England. The cultivated combined an admiration for foreign achievements with a fervent English enthusiasm. No man welcomed foreigners more eagerly than Henry VIII, and no king relied on the prejudice of his subjects more than he. But the people had no such subtlety; they heartily detested all foreigners, of whatever complexion. Hall’s Chronicle quite falsely claimed that the huge number of strangers in London prevented the English workmen from earning a living. Henry’s attack on the jurisdiction of the Pope and the subsequent rise of the English Church could hardly have taken place without the native prejudice of the people. When Wyatt raised his rebellion against Mary in 1554, he did so, as it was claimed, to prevent England ‘from overrunning by foreigners’.

  Mary, however, did not share this national prejudice. She was half Spanish by birth and, all her life, had received the kindest help from Spain and the worst treatment from England. She had no thought for the developing commercial rivalry between Spain and England caused by the exclusion of England from the riches of the Spanish New World. She hoped to bring her country back to Catholicism, and thought that this could be done best under the tutelage of Spain, the most Catholic of powers. And lastly, she was a Tudor and did not like opposition; in the matter of her marriage she was determined to have her way. In October 1553, on her knees before the altar, she vowed to become the wife of Philip.

  Her decision offended most of the country; even Gardiner, the Queen’s ally in Catholicism, recommended her to marry Edward Courtenay, a dissolute nonentity descended from the House of York. When the representatives of Spain came to conclude the match in January 1554, they were showered with snowballs by the London mob. And in the course of three months disaffection turned into Wyatt’s rebellion. But the rebels learnt to their cost the august majesty of Tudor rule, sustained by nearly seventy years of autocracy. Mary met the attack on London with disdainful courage, exhorting the citizens to stand fast against the rebels, ‘and fear them not, for I assure you I fear them nothing at all’. The attack faltered on Ludgate Hill and Wyatt was taken as he wearily sat on a bench outside a tavern.

  Within a year Mary had used up most of the goodwill of her accession. The warning given by Wyatt’s rebellion would have checked a more politic or a less stubborn person than Mary. But she pressed on both with the plans for her marriage and with the restoration of Catholicism. On 25th July 1554, at Winchester Cathedral, the thirty-eight-year-old Queen was married to Philip, her junior by eleven years. And now that the marriage was done, the way was clear for the restoration of the Catholic faith. Her new father-in-law, the Emperor Charles V, having by the marriage drawn England under the Spanish cloak, advised her to go slowly in matters of religion; for, like most rulers in the new age of the Renaissance, he preferred to put policy before religion and did not want Mary to alienate her subjects. But Gardiner, the imperial ambassador reported, was ‘most ardent and hot-headed in the affairs of religion’; the Queen was impatient for the return of the old faith, and she was supported by the austere Cardinal Pole,2 an unwavering English Catholic all his life and an unsuccessful candidate for the papacy.

  Pole set out to undo the Reformation of Henry and Edward. Mary’s third Parliament met towards the end of 1554; on 29th November both Houses were summoned to ratify the reunion with Rome, which they did with only two opposing. Parliament then revived the heresy laws of Richard II, Henry IV and Henry V, and, after lengthy discussion, restored the papal supremacy and jurisdiction. But the Church could not recover her property sequestrated in the last two reigns, and the failure to do this, in the wise view of William Cecil, showed the hollowness of the reconversion. And the imperial envoy agreed with Cecil. The point was soon brought home to Mary and her advisers. When the heresy laws were put into effect at the beginning of 1555, the government was surprised by the strength of the resistance from the Protestant clergy and from the humble laity. At the top of English society, where politics and not religion mattered, the great men and women—Elizabeth, Cecil, Arundel, Pembroke, etc.—easily conformed to Mary’s wishes. ‘They discharged their duty’, wrote a Venetian envoy, ‘as subjects to their prince by living as he lives, believing what he believes, and in short doing whatever he commands.’ But in the humble depths, and among the clergy, there appeared a Reformed fervour which hardly anyone had suspected. The execution of John Rogers, biblical scholar and the first Protestant to die, inflamed opinion against Mary. And the resolute deaths of Hooper, Saunders, Ferrar, Ridley, Latimer and Cranmer in the same year only strengthened the Protestants and discomforted the Catholics. ‘You have lost the hearts’, a lady wrote to the Catholic Bishop Bonner, ‘of twenty thousand that were rank papists within this twelve months.’ Before the end of the reign just short of three hundred Protestants had been executed, and their deaths have a triumphant celebration in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. Parliament passed the legislation, the ecclesiastical courts condemned the heretics, and the lay arm carried out the executions; but the responsibility for this persecution was with Mary and her Council.

  The country was slipping from the Queen’s grasp. It seemed that all she did either destroyed Englishmen or lessened the influence of their country. A virulent hatred grew up against Rome, against Catholics, against Spaniards, against all—it seemed—that was dear to the Queen. Her husband had failed her. He had little interest in the middle-aged, narrow virgin who had become his wife; his aim was to win for himself the direction of English policy and to bring the country under the rule of Spain. When this was denied him he soon left for the more pleasant surroundings of the Spanish Netherlands where he amused himself with a young countess. Mary was desolate, and insisted that the dropsical swelling in her belly was Philip’s child. Daily, her ardent letters followed her absent husband, to which he replied with cool words, angry that she could not persuade Parliament to let him share the English crown. The common people detested him, and put about provocative rumours concerning his impotence. In March 1557 Philip, now king of Spain on the abdication of his father, returned briefly to England and drew the country into a war against France which none wanted. For two years the harvests had been bad; the coffers of the treasury were empty, and the foreign debt was increasing. The profit of the war went to Philip, the losses to England. On 8th January 1558 the English at Calais capitulated and England’s last continental possession passed into French hands after an interval of over two hundred years. Though Calais was not worth the cost of keeping it, and must have fallen sooner or later, its loss was a humiliation to the English for which they blamed the Queen and her husband.

  At the end Mary was without hope. She went through the motions of her stubborn policy like a sleepwalker, burning heretics to the last, a tiny, hysterical, sick woman of forty-two. Nothing had come of her poli
cy; England was further from Catholicism than it had ever been in the days of Henry and Edward; the people were more insular than before, cursing Rome and Spain impartially; and the country was poor, debt-ridden and troubled. After much pain and fortified by the rites of the Church, she died on 17th November 1558.

  Mary was out of her time—a fervent religious ruler in an age of policy. She had qualities that no other Tudor possessed; she was more honest, more scrupulous, less callous and vindictive than any of her house. Her administration—as distinct from her policy—tried to banish corruption and was kind to the poor. She was generous-hearted and forgiving in all matters except faith. Rebels, traitors, plotters went free while humble Protestants of unblemished life were inexorably condemned. The cruel logic of her faith, which punished trying to preserve the religious purity of the community, made her pitiless towards those who opposed her religion. She had little knowledge and less understanding of English feelings. She was the only Tudor with a foreign parent, and her education was more Spanish than English. The calculating cruelty which her father practised on her in the name of English policy left her too hurt and puzzled to see the particular problems of her native land. As she could not understand her people, so they could never forgive her terrible persecution. Nationalism was their faith, as Catholicism was hers. She could not worship at their shrine and they would not at hers. The division between ruler and people, as wide as at any time in history, caused her own people to brand her with the worst name ever given to an English sovereign: she became Bloody Mary.