Tudor Women Queens & Commoners

by Alison Plowden

  As Mary and her little party pushed on down the road which ran straight for mile after mile through the flat fertile farmlands of East Anglia, she probably had no very clear plans in mind. She was too much of a Tudor, and too much her mother's daughter, to be ready to give in without a fight, but she can have had few illusions about the desperate nature of her predicament. Certainly few outsiders believed she had a chance. She might be King Harry's daughter and the rightful heir, but Northumberland was the man in power. With the Council in his pocket, he controlled the capital, the treasury, the navy, the fortress of the Tower and its armoury, and had the reputation of being 'the best man of war' in the realm. Opposing him was a frail, sickly woman in her late thirties, without money, soldiers, advice or any organized support. The result of such a contest looked to be a foregone conclusion. But the Duke knew how narrow his power base really was and how quickly most of his supporters would desert him the moment the going got rough. His survival depended on a swift, bloodless success, and every day that Mary remained at large shortened the odds in her favour.

  By Sunday, 9 July, she had reached the comparative safety of Kenninghall, and Northumberland had been forced to show his hand. The Bishop of London, preaching at St. Paul's Cross, attacked both the Princesses as bastards but especially Mary, a papist who would bring foreigners into the country. On the following day Jane Grey was proclaimed Queen and brought in stately procession to the Tower, her Dudley husband, resplendent in white and gold, preening himself at her side and her mother acting as her train-bearer. But that evening, just as the new Court was sitting down to dinner, a letter arrived from the rival Queen defiantly ordering the Lords of the Council to proclaim her right and title in her city of London. Still no one really believed she stood a chance, but clearly she'd evaded the party of three hundred horse sent out with orders to catch and take her prisoner, and hopes of a swift, bloodless success were receding.

  In fact, for Mary, the miracle was already happening. She hadn't stayed long at Kenninghall and by 11 July was established at Framlingham Castle, a fortified place closer to the sea. She may still have been considering the possibility of flight, but now every day that passed was making the necessity for that last, humiliating admission of defeat seem less urgent. Even before she left Kenninghall, substantial local gentlemen like Sir Henry Bedingfield and Harry Jerningham had rallied to her with their tenantry, and at Framlingham, where she raised her standard for the first time, more and more volunteers were coming to offer their allegiance. Important men like Sir Thomas Wharton, Sir John Mordaunt, Sir Edward Hastings, the Earl of Sussex and his son, and the Earl of Bath were on their way to join her, while 'innumerable small companies of the common people' carrying their makeshift weapons, trudged through the lanes towards the castle in a spontaneous, heartwarming show of support for the true Tudor line. On 12 July the town of Norwich had her publicly proclaimed and sent her men and supplies, and on the fourteenth the crews of the royal ships lying off Yarmouth came over to her in a body, bringing their captains and their heavy guns with them. This was such an encouraging development that Mary decided the time had come to review her forces; but as she rode along the ranks the enthusiasm was so great, the cries of ‘Long live our good Queen Mary!' and the firing-off of harquebuses so deafening that her palfrey, who was used to a quiet life, would do nothing but rear. So the Queen had to dismount and go about the camp on foot, her eyes filling with ready tears at the sight of so much loyalty and true devotion.

  Meanwhile, the Duke of Northumberland had ridden out of London at the head of a hastily-mustered army, which was being paid at the unusually high rate of tenpence a day, with the avowed aim of fetching in the Lady Mary like the rebel she was. But the good fortune, sense of timing and genius for command which had always combined to sustain him in the past, were no longer there. His men began to melt away, and the reinforcements he had been promised did not materialize. Herded together in the Tower, his confederates, having manoeuvred him into the exposed position of field commander, were already planning to disown him, and the news now coming in of Mary's growing strength panicked them into action. On 18 July the decision was taken, and between five and six o'clock on the following afternoon the Council proclaimed Mary Tudor 'Queen of England, France and Ireland, and all dominions, as the sister of the late King Edward vi and daughter unto the noble King Henry VIII'. Popular reaction was unmistakable. 'The bonfires were without number,' reported an anonymous correspondent in the City, 'and what with shouting and crying of the people, and ringing of the bells, there could no one hear almost what another said, besides banquetings and singing in the streets for joy.'

  Even in Protestant London, relief at the downfall of Northumberland and the failure of his attempted coup more than outweighed the fact of Mary's Catholicism - for the present at least. But no one out on the streets that summer night, singing and feasting and drinking Queen Mary's health, was thinking much about the future, or about the likely fate of the fifteen-year-old girl who had reigned for nine days as Queen. Faint echoes of the general rejoicing could be heard in the Tower where, so it was said, the Duke of Suffolk had broken the news to his daughter and with his own hands helped to tear down the cloth of estate above her head, saying such things were not for her. Then he had gone out on to Tower Hill and proclaimed the Lady Mary's Grace to be Queen of England, before scuttling away to his house at Sheen. Jane was left alone, a prisoner in the stripped and silent rooms which a few hours before had been her palace - for her there would be no going home.

  The new Queen was now making her way slowly and still cautiously towards the capital. By the end of July she had reached the village of Wanstead, and there she was greeted by the Princess Elizabeth, apparently quite recovered from her recent illness, who had ridden out accompanied by a numerous train of gentlemen, knights and ladies to escort her sister on the last stage of her journey. It was some years since the two had met, but the reunion seemed an affectionate one, and Mary gave Elizabeth a prominent place in the procession which, on the evening of 3 August, entered the City at Aldgate to pass through streets decorated with banners and streamers and lined with wildly cheering crowds.

  They made a painful contrast, these two daughters of Henry VIII. Mary had once been a pretty, graceful girl, with an exceptionally beautiful complexion. Dispassionate observers could still describe her as 'fresh-coloured', but the long years of unhappiness, ill-health and unkindness had left their mark, and at thirty-seven the Queen was a thin, sandy-haired, tight-lipped little woman who looked her age and more. Elizabeth, riding less than a horse's length behind her, would be twenty in a month's time. She was never considered a beauty, 'comely rather than handsome', remarked the Venetian ambassador, but she had grown into a tall, elegant young woman with a clear, pale skin and the family's reddish-gold hair who, like her mother, knew how to make the best of herself. She held herself well, dressed with a severe simplicity which suited her admirably and had beautiful hands which she took care to display. More important, she was young, Protestant and Tudor, and there can be little doubt that to very many of the citizens of London it was Elizabeth who represented their hopes for the future.

  While her first, brief incredulous flush of happiness lasted, Mary showed her sister a marked degree of attention, holding her by the hand whenever they appeared in public together and always giving her the place of honour at her side - a cosy state of affairs which lasted no longer than a matter of weeks. Mary, to her credit, had never borne malice to the child Elizabeth, who'd once been the innocent cause of so much jealous misery, but the adult Elizabeth was quite a different proposition, and Catherine of Aragon's daughter was finding it increasingly difficult to conceal her instinctive dislike of the cool, self-possessed young lady whose presence served as a constant reminder of that infamous woman, Nan Bullen the whore.

  The immediate bone of contention was, inevitably, religion. Mary never doubted for one moment that her miraculous preservation had been due entirely to the personal interventio
n of the Almighty, or that it was now her clear and sacred duty to lead her people back into the fold of the true Church, and Mass, though still officially illegal, was already being publicly celebrated at Court. The Lords of the Council, with the embarrassment of recent events fresh in their minds, attended assiduously, but the Princess Elizabeth did not put in an appearance until the beginning of September and even then contrived to make it pretty plain that she was doing so under duress.

  The burgeoning hostility between the Queen and her heiress presumptive was also, unfortunately, receiving outside encouragement. Mary, accustomed since her teens to relying on her mother's family for guidance and support, was now turning to Simon Renard, the new Imperial ambassador, as naturally and trustfully as in the past she had turned to Eustace Chapuys; and Renard, a shrewd and skilful diplomat whose task was to rebuild the Anglo-Imperial alliance, regarded the heretical Elizabeth as a serious potential danger - an obvious focal point for domestic discontent, whether religious or political. He told the Emperor, in a curiously felicitous phrase, that she had 'a spirit full of enchantment' and was greatly to be feared. He told the Queen, frequently and unnecessarily, not to trust her sister, as she was 'clever and sly' and might easily prove disloyal. The French, too, had an interest in promoting dissension at the English Court. The young Queen of Scotland would soon be ready for her long-planned marriage with the Dauphin and, despite the provisions of her great-uncle Henry's Will, she still possessed, by all the accepted laws of inheritance, a strong claim to the reversion of the English crown. The King of France was naturally much attracted by the prospect of seeing his daughter-in-law become queen of both the island kingdoms, and if the Tudor sisters could be provoked or tricked into destroying one another, he was by no means unhopeful of the issue.

  Certainly relations between the Tudor sisters seemed to be going from bad to worse. Mary did not believe Elizabeth's assurances that she went to Mass 'because her conscience prompted and moved her to it', and in a hysterical outburst that autumn she cried out that it would be a scandal and a disgrace to the kingdom to allow her sister to succeed her, as she was a heretic, a hypocrite and a bastard. On another occasion the Queen went so far as to declare that she couldn't even be certain Elizabeth was King Henry's bastard, for she looked just like Mark Smeaton the lute-player, one of the young men who had died with Anne Boleyn.

  Elizabeth managed to secure her proper place at Mary's coronation (she was paired in the procession with that old family friend, Anne of Cleves) but what with the Queen's undisguised rancour, Renard's unsleeping distrust and the false-friend approaches of the French ambassador, her position was becoming acutely uncomfortable, and she asked permission to retire from the Court. After some hesitation, permission was granted, and early in December the sisters met to say goodbye. Elizabeth once more protested her loyalty and good intentions, begging the Queen not to listen to 'evil reports' of her, while Mary, unusually gracious, responded with an expensive parting present of a sable hood. This apparent detente was largely the work of Simon Renard, who had explained patiently to the Queen that she must make up her mind either to treat Elizabeth as an enemy and put her under some form of restraint, or else, for reasons of policy, behave towards her with at least outward civility. Mary could not bring herself to adopt the first of these alternatives, but Renard reported that he'd had a good deal of difficulty in persuading her to dissemble. 'She still resents the injuries inflicted on Queen Catherine, her lady mother, by the machinations of Anne Boleyn, mother of Elizabeth,' he wrote with a hint of exasperation.

  Mary had now been on the throne for nearly six months and was finding the exercise of power both harassing and uncongenial. A well-meaning woman of rigid moral principles -a simple, painfully honest woman, narrow in outlook and limited in experience - she was hopelessly out of her depth in the complicated, unprincipled world of high politics and possessed none of the toughness of mind essential for a successful working monarch. Not, of course, that anyone expected her to cope with this unfeminine task alone. Everyone took it for granted that she needed a husband to relieve her of the burden of government and undertake, as Simon Renard tactfully put it, 'those duties which were not the province of ladies'. But there was widespread disappointment and dismay when the Queen made it clear that she had no intention of choosing an English husband. Dismay turned to consternation when it became known that she intended to marry the Emperor's son,' Philip of Spain, and people began to remind one another of the Duke of Northumberland's predictions that Mary would bring foreigners and papists into the country.

  Opposition to the Spanish marriage hardened rapidly but the Queen clung to her purpose. The fact that Philip, a good-looking young man in his late twenties and heir to half the thrones of Europe, happened to be the most brilliant match available weighed far less with her than the fact that he was a Spaniard and of her mother's kin. Skilfully encouraged by Renard and driven by her own craving for the affection and security she had for so long been denied, Mary was already more than half in love - a heady sensation for one who had 'never harboured thoughts of voluptuousness' and had hitherto schooled herself to an almost nun-like renunciation of the flesh. She did not reach her decision lightly but when, after weeks of heart-searching and prayer, Mary gave her word to Renard in the presence of the Holy Sacrament, she had convinced herself that it was God's will for her to marry Philip, and after that she was immovable. She paid no attention to those friends and councillors who tried to warn her of the trouble she was storing up for herself. She huffily dismissed a parliamentary delegation which came to beg her to marry an Englishman, telling them they had no business to dictate to her on such a personal matter and anyway, if they forced her to marry against her will, she would not live three months, and then they would be sorry! Even more foolishly, she shut her ears to the ominous rumblings of popular alarm at the prospect of being ruled by 'the proud Spaniard'.

  In fact, in drawing up the marriage treaty, the Emperor was leaning over backwards in his efforts not to offend the delicate susceptibilities of the English - an alliance which would give him command of the sea route between Spain and the Netherlands was worth any amount of diplomacy. But the English were currently in the grip of one of their periodic attacks of xenophobia, and many otherwise quite sensible people preferred to believe the rumours being spread by various interested parties, who included the French ambassador and the radical wing of the Protestant party, that a horde of Spaniards, all armed to the teeth, would shortly be landing on their coasts ready to ravish their wives, deflower their daughters and despoil them of their goods and lands; that England was about to become a province of the Empire and that the Pope's authority would be restored by force.

  By the beginning of February 1554, this rising tide of panic and prejudice had erupted into the most serious revolt against the authority of the Crown within living memory, and Sir Thomas Wyatt and his Kentishmen came very close indeed to gaining control of the capital. That they failed was due in large part to Mary's own courage and her stubborn refusal to be intimidated by violence. Ignoring advice that she should seek her own safety, she went down to the City and made a fighting speech in the crowded Guildhall which not even Elizabeth could have bettered. Although her own presence chamber at Whitehall was full of armed men, the gentlemen pensioners with their pole-axes in their hands; although her ladies made 'great lamentations', weeping and wringing their hands; although at one point the sound of gunfire around Charing Cross could be heard within the precincts of the palace, the Queen stood fast - a gallant little figure watching from the gallery over the gatehouse, sending word that she would 'tarry to see the uttermost' and unmoved by the general terror and confusion, the slamming of doors and the 'running and shrieking of gentlewomen'.

  The rebellion collapsed, but the Queen could now no longer afford the luxury of showing mercy to her enemies, and one of the first victims of the government's new hard-line policy was, tragically, Lady Jane Grey. Mary had so far refused to sanction her cousin's exe
cution. Jane, she had told Renard the previous summer, was not to be blamed for Northumberland's treason. The child had been helpless in his grasp, and Mary's conscience would not allow her to see an innocent, if misguided, young creature put to death. Jane must stand trial and stay in the Tower for a while, but as soon as it seemed safe to do so, the Queen intended to set her free. In the aftermath of armed rebellion, things looked rather different. Innocent Jane might be, but this did not alter the fact that her very existence had come to represent an unacceptable danger to the state. Her own father's behaviour had made that only too clear, for the Duke of Suffolk, who owed his continued life and liberty entirely to Mary's generosity, had tried to raise the Midlands on his daughter's behalf. Jane had been named as heir by the late King Edward (who now wore a Protestant halo). She had been publicly proclaimed and had actually worn the crown. As long as she lived, she could be used again as the figure head for a Protestant plot. Few people urged this view more strongly than those lords of the Council, so recently prominent Protestant plotters themselves, who were now acutely anxious that this inconvenient reminder of their past indiscretions should be permanently removed. Mary would have saved Jane if it had been within her power, but neither Mary, for all her obstinate, conscientious courage, nor Jane, with her brilliant intellect, was a match for the desperate, ruthless men who surrounded them. Both in their different ways were the helpless victims of their circumstances.