by G. J. Meyer
The evangelicals for their part, having had things almost entirely their way since the last months of Henry VIII, remained fiercely committed to expunging every trace of Catholicism from English life. This was true of no one more than of Cranmer, who seemed to grow more radical by the month. By 1553 he had had ready for Parliament’s attention his Code of Ecclesiastical Constitutions, a revision of canon law that, if enacted, would have made it heresy to believe not just in papal supremacy but in transubstantiation (described as “repugnant to the plain words of scripture”) and not to believe in justification by faith alone. Anyone accused of such offenses was to be tried in the church courts, excommunicated upon conviction, and given sixteen days in which to recant or be turned over to the civil authorities for execution. John Dudley, who blamed Cranmer for the frequency with which evangelical preachers were offending the rich and powerful by criticizing their ongoing seizures of church property, had taken his revenge by blocking action on Cranmer’s code in the House of Lords. He then discredited the proposal—cleverly gave Parliament a reason to reject it—by allowing it to be published under a demonstrably false claim that it had the approval of the Canterbury Convocation.
In all likelihood Dudley was able to thwart Cranmer only because by this point the young king was on the brink of death. Almost certainly the code would have become law—Dudley might not have dared even to raise objections—if Edward had remained strong enough to give it vigorous support. It accorded perfectly with his revulsion against Catholic doctrine and his belief that it was his responsibility to transform England into Christ’s kingdom on earth. Cranmer’s attempt to revise canon law shows that he was no less willing than the most radical reformers on the continent to use the state’s power over life and death to stamp out error and spread the gospel. It is impossible to doubt that Edward would have gone along with him.
Cranmer was understandably bitter after Mary became queen. Not only had everything that he still wanted to achieve suddenly become impossible, but the stupendous gains of the past half-dozen years were in imminent danger of being undone. News reached him of one setback after another. Even Elizabeth, in whom the evangelicals had invested so much hope, was reported to be attending mass with her sister the queen, establishing a chapel in her home, even ordering from the continent a chalice, a cross, and other things useful only for engaging in the ceremonies of the papists. Cranmer exploded in rage when informed that a mass had been celebrated in his cathedral church at Canterbury and, worse, that it was said to have been done with his approval. His printed denial dripped with invective, condemning the mass as a concoction of the pope, that arch-persecutor of Christ and true religion. He asked for an opportunity to demonstrate to the queen herself that the mass was blasphemy and that the church as purified during her brother’s reign expressed the authentic spirit of Christianity. This got him a summons to appear before the council, followed by commitment to the Tower. Neither he nor anyone else can possibly have been surprised. Cranmer had not only been conspicuous among those proclaiming Jane Grey queen, he had contributed part of his personal security force to the army with which Dudley had set forth from London to confront and capture Mary. Now he was accused also of “spreading abroad seditious bills, and moving tumults to the disquietness of the present state,” and his guilt was again obvious.
From the start of Mary’s reign, however, the attention of council, Parliament, court, and even the kingdom at large was focused at least as much on the question of the queen’s marriage as on religious issues. Mary appears to have had little if any personal interest in taking a husband. There was nothing in her past to suggest that she had ever had strong romantic inclinations, or that she was a particularly sexual creature. In the 1530s, at the nadir of her fortunes, she had expressed the hope of entering the religious life, possibly in Spain. By 1553 she seemed a settled, satisfied, and distinctly middle-aged spinster, an amiable creature who enjoyed music and dance and gambling for small stakes and shared her father’s and brother’s taste for jewelry and costly dress, but was no more inclined than she had been in youth to engage in flirtations or dalliances. It was a long time since she had had great value on the international marriage market, an equally long time since she had given evidence of wishing for a spouse or children.
But she had been raised and educated to be not a ruler but a consort to some male monarch. And now, contrary to everyone’s expectations including her own, she found herself an unmarried female monarch in a world that scarcely knew what to make of such an anomaly. Her situation seemed unnatural to almost everyone—certainly to Mary herself. It seemed contrary to nature that any woman, even a queen, should not be subordinate to some man. The universal question, virtually from the first day of her reign, was not whether she should marry but whom.
It is understandable if Mary herself, so alone and vulnerable for much of her life, welcomed the thought of a partner with whom to share the unfamiliar burdens of rule. It is no less understandable if she wanted a child—and not for sentimental reasons, but as the one sure way of ensuring that England would not fall back into the hands of the evangelicals after her death. If she could find a partner capable of compensating for her lack of political experience and skill, so much the better. But what was truly essential was that her husband be a religious conservative—certainly a Catholic, preferably a Roman Catholic. That narrowed the field of candidates. One obvious possibility was Mary’s cousin Reginald Pole, who as a young man had broken with Henry over the divorce, observed from abroad as the king destroyed one of his brothers and executed another and finally had his mother killed as well, and now was a cardinal of the church (though not an ordained priest and therefore not under a binding vow of celibacy). Pole was so well respected as a person, a scholar, and a reformer-from-within that in 1549, while doing nothing to advance his own candidacy, he had come within two votes of being elected pope. He had only one disadvantage, but it was a decisive one: seventeen years older than Mary, Pole had no intention of marrying her or anyone else. In fact he was opposed to Mary’s taking a husband, seeing more clearly than most that whoever she chose, whether English or foreign, was going to present her with serious political problems.
Another possibility was another of the queen’s cousins, that same Edward Courtenay, now the Earl of Devon and endowed with estates consistent with his new rank, who had come to manhood as a prisoner in the Tower. Among Courtenay’s advantages was the fact that his mother, the widow Gertrude, Marchioness of Exeter (Henry VIII had had her husband killed), happened to be one of Mary’s oldest, closest, and most faithful friends. Courtenay was a quarter of a century younger than Pole, a decade younger than the queen. His mother, not surprisingly, thought he would make a splendid consort, and the fact of his royal blood won him the support of most of the experienced politicians on the council, Chancellor Gardiner among them. These men believed, as did virtually everyone in those days, that no woman should attempt to rule without a husband. They believed also that popular opinion would be far more accepting of an English husband than of any foreigner. Gardiner had another, more personal reason for supporting Courtenay. During their years as fellow prisoners they had formed a close relationship, one that apparently caused the bishop to regard the youth as a kind of surrogate son and blinded him to the defects in Courtenay’s character.
The list of possible foreign husbands was extensive and included the king of Denmark and the heir to the throne of Portugal. When Mary sought the advice of her cousin the emperor Charles—she had been taught by her mother to trust her Hapsburg kin, and all her life looked to them for guidance and support—he briefly considered offering to marry her himself. Mary made it clear that she would welcome such an offer (the two had, after all, been engaged when Mary was a small child); Charles was a widower (not for the first time), and though she had not seen him in decades he had, at long distance, come to seem not only a protector but a kind of father. But he was Pole’s age, and thoroughly world-weary after a lifetime of struggling to hold
together his vast but ramshackle and perpetually threatened empire. He had the good sense to rule himself out. But rather than forgo the advantages of a firm and lasting alliance with England, even perhaps of adding England to a Hapsburg patrimony that already included Spain and the Netherlands and much of Germany and Italy and the New World, he offered his son Philip.
Immediately Philip became, with Courtenay, one of the two leading candidates. He also became a bone of contention inside the English court. Favored by most of Mary’s female intimates and the men who had been officers of her household in the bad old days before her brother’s death (several of those men now sat on the Privy Council despite being political innocents), Philip was opposed by Gardiner and most of the council’s other old hands. These seasoned professionals, several of whom had sat on Edward VI’s council and been followers of John Dudley right up to the point where the effort to enthrone Jane Grey collapsed, understood the impact of the anti-Spanish propaganda that had begun with Henry VIII and grown steadily more intense as the Reformation proceeded under his son. Many of the people alive in England in 1553 had been taught from childhood that Spain was the handmaiden of the Antichrist. Philip, though a Hapsburg, was a Spanish Hapsburg, and many of Mary’s subjects were certain to find him hard if not impossible to accept.
Mary was unpersuaded, perhaps in part because she had little confidence in some of the men who warned her of danger. A number of her advisers remained on the council only because they were too influential, too dangerous, to be put aside. Everything in her experience disposed her to want an alliance with the Hapsburgs. When she was shown a portrait of the blond and blue-eyed Philip—no doubt one of the portraits that showed off the legs of which he was so proud—this inclination turned into infatuation.
In fact Philip had much to recommend him, and not just his family connections. At twenty-six he was already a significant figure on the world stage, intelligent and serious-minded and an experienced junior partner in the management of his father’s immense (and at times unmanageable) domains. Like his father a widower (his first wife had been a Portuguese cousin), he had a young son and so was obviously fertile. If he was known to dally with women to whom he was not married, he never did so as recklessly as young Courtenay, who had begun to run wild almost as soon as he was released from prison. In any case, such dalliance was neither unexpected in royalty nor easily condemned in a healthy young man whose wife had been dead for eight years and whose chances for remarriage were circumscribed by the political schemes of his father the emperor. The Hapsburgs had for centuries been masters of the advantageous marriage; it was how they had extended their empire into the Netherlands, Spain, and elsewhere. It would hardly have been reasonable to expect the men of the family to be entirely satisfied with wives chosen for reasons of territorial expansion. As for Mary, no daughter of Henry VIII could have been deeply shocked by the thought of discreet sexual adventuring on the part of royal males.
Courtenay, whose good looks and aristocratic bearing had made a favorable initial impression in the days just after his release, was soon showing that fifteen years in prison had left him desperately eager for the pleasures of the flesh. Arrogance and dissolute behavior soon cost him all but his most indulgent supporters, mainly his mother and Gardiner. The queen, who had little difficulty in taking Courtenay’s measure, appears never to have seriously considered marrying him. English and Spanish diplomats were put to work on constructing the terms of a Hapsburg marriage, while Mary turned her attention to other concerns. Arrangements got under way for the first Parliament of the new reign, and for a coronation ceremony to be conducted beforehand, so as to avoid any suggestion that Mary’s possession of the crown was dependent on parliamentary approval. The coronation, a lavish affair, took place on October 1 with Gardiner presiding in place of Archbishop Cranmer. Mary took an oath that avoided any mention of the reforms of the preceding reign and omitted all the words with which the boy Edward, at his coronation, had laid claim to supremacy over the church. Two days before, in an even more forceful demonstration of her determination to break with the recent past, Mary had gathered the members of her council in the Tower. Lowering herself to her knees, she had spoken earnestly, almost tearfully of the duties rather than the powers of monarchs, and of her wish to fulfill those duties to the limits of her strength. The episode suggests the depth of Mary’s wish to rule well and wisely, and her lack of confidence in her own abilities. It is impossible to imagine her father, or her brother even at age nine, assuming such a posture or uttering such words.
Philip, meanwhile, was coming to terms with the prospect of taking as his wife a woman eleven years his senior, a woman he was accustomed to calling his aunt. He had been exploring a marriage to yet another Portuguese princess (his mother as well as his first wife had come from the royal house of Portugal, the Hapsburgs being almost suicidally insensitive to the dangers of inbreeding) when Europe was surprised to learn that Mary Tudor had emerged from the turmoil following her brother’s death in firm possession of the English throne. It seems improbable that the emperor Charles, in offering his son to Mary, was motivated primarily by the hope of adding England permanently to the family business. He was aware of Mary’s age and the chronically troublesome state of her health; the likelihood of her producing healthy children would have seemed less than impressive. Beyond that he already possessed more of Europe and the Americas than he and his son together could properly manage even with the help of various kin, and the England of the 1550s seemed to Charles and Philip alike (not entirely without reason) a poor, half-civilized island of distinctly secondary importance perched off one of Europe’s less attractive coasts. But the marriage offered important advantages all the same. It could eliminate the danger of England’s entering into an alliance with Spain’s archenemy, the king of France. The south coast of England formed the northern edge of the English Channel, the nautical highway that connected Spain to the Hapsburgs’ Low Countries possessions and was bounded to the south by France. Charles, after decades of fending off ambitious rivals, after recurrent wars that had cost him much and gained him nothing, after the failure of all his attempts to stamp out the Reformation in Germany, was worn down and heartsick. He was beginning to dream of passing his burdens to his son, of devoting whatever remained of his life to a preparation for death. The English marriage could help to make this possible. In all of Europe there were few economic relationships more important than that between England and the Netherlands, and Hapsburg—meaning Spanish—rule of the Netherlands was far from popular. But if Philip married the queen of England, if he himself became England’s king, he could at a single stroke be transformed from an alien oppressor to an asset valuable to the Dutch. The delicate process of passing the crown of Spain (and with it possession of the Netherlands) from Charles to Philip might be vastly simplified. That alone was enough to make the marriage appealing.
Ten days after Mary’s coronation Philip’s formal proposal of marriage arrived at her court. Within the month, with Parliament in session, Mary informed the council of her decision to accept. The news proved to be as unpopular as Pole and Gardiner had feared: England did not want a foreign king, least of all a Spanish one. Parliament sent a delegation to the queen, expressing its unhappiness with her plans and begging her to reconsider. Her peremptory refusal—her anger at Parliament’s presuming to intrude into a matter as personal as matrimony, its effrontery in supposing that she might subordinate the interests of her subjects to the promptings of her heart—soon persuaded an assortment of disaffected and unstable hotheads that only desperate measures could save England from becoming an appendage of the Hapsburg empire. Mary had made the first great mistake, indeed the seminal blunder, of her reign. She had put herself at odds not only with some portion of England’s ruling elite but with many of her people.
A marriage treaty still needed to be hammered out, one that would settle the specific terms of the union. Mary had sufficient acumen to assign the negotiations to Stephen Gardin
er, who, as the highest-placed opponent of the match, could be depended upon not only to drive a hard bargain but, once he had satisfied himself, to have maximum credibility in bringing other skeptics around. Parliament meanwhile, perhaps chastened by the queen’s anger, proved cooperative in other matters. By repealing Henry VIII’s Succession Act of 1534 it restored the validity of the marriage of Mary’s parents, thereby making her once again legitimate. The most recent and aggressive definitions of treason were likewise repealed, so that treason became once again what it had been in the fifteenth century: an overt action, not just something said. All nine Edwardian reform statutes, Cranmer’s acts of uniformity and the legalization of clerical marriage included, were swept away. Essentially the church was returned to what it had been at the time of Henry VIII’s death, and in some respects to what it had been under Henry VII. Praemunire crimes were abolished, along with felonies that had not been violations of the law until Henry VIII made them so.
Ambitious as all this was, Mary and Gardiner were proceeding with caution. They had separated the question of Mary’s legitimacy from the religious issues, specifically from the issue of supremacy. Nothing had been done to bring the supremacy under discussion and thereby to alarm at least the more moderate reformers. (About the radicals nothing could be done. They of course had been alarmed and offended since it first became plain that Mary had won the throne.)
