Inglorious Royal Marriages

by Leslie Carroll

  Aware that her courtiers and ministers had their own personal and religious agendas for wishing her to espouse an English subject, Mary defended her choice. The kingdom needed to checkmate French plots, and the contracted marriage of the dauphin to Mary, Queen of Scots, would strategically unite two of England’s greatest enemies. How would Mary Tudor’s kingdom benefit if she wed Edward Courtenay? And how might it profit by an alliance with Philip of Spain!

  On November 16, 1553, a parliamentary delegation requested that Mary marry within the realm. John Pollard, the Speaker of the Commons, was a trained lawyer and judge. He launched into a long-winded, xenophobic, and condescending diatribe about the perils and pitfalls inherent in the queen’s selection of a foreign husband. Such a man would displease her subjects. He would deplete England of money and arms. “Out of husbandly tyranny” he might even dare to remove the queen from her own country. If Mary left him a widower with young children, he might even attempt to usurp the crown. When Pollard finally had the nerve to lecture the monarch as if he were speaking to an ignorant schoolgirl, rather than to his sovereign, insisting that “it would be better for the queen to marry a subject of hers,” Mary finally lost her patience.

  She rose to address the assembly of men. Controlling her temper, she informed them that a search of histories and chronicles would reveal that no one—no one—had ever used such disrespectful language to a king of England, and that even when kings had been children, their advisers had given them liberty in matters of marriage.

  Mary was just warming up. She did not appreciate the notion of Parliament choosing “a companion” for her “conjugal bed,” declaring in her reportedly deep and booming voice, “I now rule over you by the best right possible, and being a free woman, if any man or woman of the people of our realm is free, I have full right and sufficient years to discern a suitable partner in love.” Her Tudor dander up, she continued: It was “entirely vain for you to nominate a prospective husband for me from your own fancy, but rather let it be my free choice to select a worthy husband for my bridal bed—one who will not only join with me in mutual love, but will be able with his own resources to prevent an enemy attack, from his native land.”

  According to the Spanish ambassador, Mary resolutely insisted that “if she were married against her will she would not live three months and she would have no children. . . . [A]nd so, Mr. Speaker, you will defeat your own ends.” Her selection of a husband would be divinely inspired; only prayer and guidance from the Almighty would lead to the correct choice “who would be beneficial to the kingdom and agreeable to herself . . . for she always thought of the welfare of her kingdom, as a good princess and mistress should.”

  Her reply rendered Pollard and his delegation dumbstruck, and they departed in silence.

  But Mary wasn’t finished. Suspecting that her Lord Chancellor, the Bishop of Winchester, had prompted the visit from the parliamentary delegation, she confronted Gardiner directly. She would “never marry Courtenay,” Mary told him angrily. “Is it suitable, that I should be forced to marry a man because a bishop made friends with him in prison?”

  Gardiner backed down, and Mary’s Parliament and council begrudgingly accepted the monarch’s choice of bridegroom. Her subjects, however, were not so easily appeased. Spanish negotiators, arriving in mid-January 1554 to discuss the terms of the impending marriage treaty, were pelted with snowballs by London apprentices.

  The Spaniards favored the match for precisely the reason the English were so fervently against it. The tiny, auburn-haired Mary, already physically shriveled and looking older than her years, with her poor fashion sense—abundant jewelry, and garish textiles in every shade of red—was herself not the prize: It was control of England. Moreover, any child of their union would inherit not only Mary’s England, but Spanish Hapsburg territories as well: the Low Countries and, under certain circumstances, Spain. As Philip’s father Charles V wrote, “I trust [the marriage] will prove a factor of weight in our endeavours to serve God and guard and increase our dominions.”

  However, Charles was fully aware of Mary’s age. Her poor health was no secret, and although she’d always been fond of young children and had dreamed of motherhood, her childbearing days were numbered. The emperor hoped for the best from his son’s marriage treaty, but the terms overwhelmingly favored England. Mary’s team leveraged Parliament’s opposition to negotiate a contract that would preserve all of her rights as queen and keep Spanish power and influence in England to a minimum, regardless of the law of jure uxoris. Looking ahead to any children of Mary and Philip’s union, according to the marriage treaty their oldest son would inherit England, as well as Philip’s lands in southern Germany and Burgundy. Don Carlos, Philip’s son from his first marriage, would inherit Spain and the Hapsburg territories in Italy; those lands would, however, come under English dominion if Mary and Philip had children and Don Carlos eventually had no offspring of his own. By the terms of the marriage contract, Philip was prohibited from removing Mary and their children from England without the approval of Parliament. Should the couple have no children and Mary predecease Philip, not only would he have no rights of succession to her kingdom, but he was forbidden from influencing it. Although Philip could style himself king of England, he would really be no more than a glorified subject. The provisions of their marriage contract denied him any actual regal power, although he was permitted to assist Mary in the administrative governance of the realm. Even the attendants in his household were to be English. Finally, England was not to be dragged into any of the Hapsburgs’ foreign wars, whether instigated by the Spanish branch of the family or the Burgundian Hapsburgs.

  However, favorable as the terms were for England, they failed to assuage the fear of foreign domination. Moreover, the details of the marriage treaty were not common knowledge, even to the members of Parliament.

  England remained a powder keg of discontent, riven with ruinous poverty due to bad harvests and rampant greed among the wealthy, as well as the ongoing religious dissent. Little was needed to spark an explosion.

  Philip of Spain was a match in more ways than one. Mary’s choice of bridegroom remained so odious to her countrymen that during the early months of 1554, a handful of aristocrats fomented a four-pronged revolt, comprised of uprisings in Devon, Hereford, Leicestershire, and Kent. Their plan was to depose Mary, replacing her on the throne with Elizabeth. When the conspiracy was uncovered in January, Mary’s council acted swiftly and the Devon and Hereford plans fizzled. Jane Grey’s father joined up with the Leicestershire plotters, and Thomas Wyatt the Younger spearheaded the Kentish revolt, with a force of twenty-five hundred to three thousand men.

  Thanks to his father, Philip of Spain had his own spies and uncovered the plot. Most of the rebels never made it as far as London, but Wyatt and his men successfully reached the capital. Overriding the advice of her ministers to flee, Mary stood her ground instead, insisting that “she would tarry to see the uttermost,” proving her Tudor mettle by confronting the rebels unflinchingly. She denounced Wyatt as a traitor to the crown, and, declaring that she was “already married to this Common Weal and the faithful members of the same,” vowed to remain and shed her own royal blood, if need be, to defend her loyal subjects.

  Wyatt and his followers were tried and executed.

  Rather than see her impending Spanish marriage as the catalyst for her kingdom’s unrest, Mary chose to view the union as the only way of smothering it. Only Spanish Catholic orthodoxy could stamp out Protestant heresy, and only an alliance with Spain could keep the French wolf from England’s back door, and scare off any Scottish plans to invade as well.

  But that winter, Mary had other bad news to contend with. No longer able to swallow his discontent, on January 4, Philip had openly disavowed their marriage treaty, insisting that he could not be bound by a contract that had been negotiated without his knowledge. Nevertheless, cognizant of the importance of their union to b
oth their realms, he agreed to sign the document, aware that he had no other choice, “but by no means in order to bind himself or his heirs to observe the articles, especially any that might burden his conscience.”

  Ultimately, Philip sucked it up and made no protest, sending England his assent to their formal betrothal by proxy on March 6, 1554. However, as a passive-aggressive way of registering his ongoing disenchantment with the terms, he churlishly sent Mary no wedding gift, or even so much as a personal letter accompanying his official consent. The ring didn’t even come from Philip; it was sent by his father. Nor did he prove the eager bridegroom. Although Philip assured his father, “My own happiness and dearest hopes hang upon the result. . . . If the queen wishes me to go soon I will start without loss of time,” he did not quit his homeland until July 13, 1554.

  Anxious that his son’s attitude might botch things for Spain and the Hapsburgs, Charles V wrote to the Duke of Alva, who was assigned to accompany Philip to England: “For the love of God, see to it that my son behaves in the right manner; for otherwise I tell you I would rather never have taken the matter in hand at all.”

  “Notes for Prince Philip’s Guidance in England” had been prepared by the Spanish ambassador Simon Renard in the hope of engendering mutually good relations from the outset. The suggestions included:

  Item: when his Highness enters the kingdom, he will be well advised to . . . be affable, show himself often to the people, prove that he wishes to take no share in the administration, but leave it all to the Council . . . caress the nobles, talk with them on occasion, take them out to hunt with them. If he does so, there is no doubt whatever that they will not only love his Highness, but will adore him.

  Item: it will be well to show a benign countenance to the people and lead them to look for kindness, justice and liberty.

  Item: as his Highness knows no English it will be well to select an interpreter and have him among his attendants so that he may converse with the English. And let his Highness learn a few words in order to be able to salute them. . . .

  Item: no soldiers from the ships must be allowed to land here, in order not to confirm the suspicion inculcated by the French, that his Highness wishes to conquer the realm by force.

  Accompanied by a flotilla of eighty large ships and more than a hundred smaller ones, Philip sailed into Southampton amid torrents of rain on Friday, July 20. Before the royal spouses-to-be met in person, gifts were exchanged by their emissaries. Each gave the other a diamond, although the gem that Philip presented to his bride was considerably smaller than the one she had sent to him. Mary also invested Philip with the Order of the Garter and sent him “a very richly wrought poignard [a dagger], studded with gems, and two robes, one of them as rich and beautiful as could be imagined.” A fine white horse, handsomely caparisoned in crimson velvet, was waiting for him when he disembarked—yet another wedding gift from the generous Mary.

  On July 23, Philip finally set off for Winchester Cathedral, where he would greet his bride. The rain had never subsided. Late that evening, at long last, he met Mary, making her acquaintance in a candlelit long gallery, a grand room suitable for dancing or entertaining. Unless Philip had changed his attire beforehand, the first impression he made on his bride-to-be may have been of a drowned rat. His “rich coat embroidered with gold, his doublet hosen and hat suite-like,” with its once-jaunty plume, were sodden with rainwater. The yellow-bearded Philip saw a diminutive, russet-haired woman endeavoring to appear younger than her years, wearing a flamboyant black velvet gown heavily embellished with jewels and an underskirt of frosted silver. Mary was so fair-skinned that she appeared to have no eyebrows, and she had an unusually masculine voice.

  If Mary and Philip had been comic strip characters with thought bubbles floating above their heads, their initial impressions would have revealed the greatest royal mismatch since Henry VIII and Anne of Cleves. Mary was smitten by Philip’s blond hair, his gray-blue eyes, and his fine, courtly manners (which he employed to successfully conceal his revulsion for her). The thought bubble for Philip, who spoke no English (the pair communicated in fractured Spanish, French, and Latin), might very well have been a universally understood “Ugh,” “Bleh,” or “Ick.”

  While Mary’s ladies sweetly serenaded them on musical instruments, the couple enjoyed a pleasant meeting, with much hand kissing in the Spanish fashion. Philip even kissed Mary on the mouth, which was an English custom. They did not dine together on the night before their nuptials, further reducing their opportunity to become acquainted before they were joined together for all eternity.

  To place Philip on an equal social footing with his bride before their marriage, Charles V conferred upon his son the kingdom of Naples, as well as his own claim to the kingdom of Jerusalem. This made Philip an actual king, rather than merely an acting sovereign and prince.

  The royal wedding was held at Winchester Cathedral, the bishopric of Stephen Gardiner, on a rainy July 25, the feast day of Saint James, the patron saint of Spain. Another reason Winchester was chosen was because there had been seditious rumblings in London, and Mary felt it wise to remove the event from the capital.

  Accompanied by a number of Spanish knights, the twenty-seven-year-old groom arrived first, resplendent in a white satin doublet embroidered with gemstones and a mantle of fluted cloth of gold (another gift from Mary), that was equally embellished with jewels. Philip wore the Order of the Garter about his neck, in addition to priceless jewels of Castile. The bride reached the cathedral a half hour later, wearing an ensemble that matched Philip’s, which “blazed with jewels to an extent that dazzled those who gazed upon her.” Her purple satin gown, according to her wardrobe books, was made of “rich tissue with a border and wide sleeves, embroidered upon purple satin, set with pearls of our store, lined with purple taffeta.” The style of gown was called a partlet, a skirt with a high-collared, matching sleeveless jacket covering the chest. Mary’s white satin kirtle was embroidered with gold and silver threads. At her breast she wore a piece of jewelry known as “La Peregrina,” a pair of large diamonds set together with an enormous pear-shaped pearl, a gift from Philip and Mary’s father-in-law. Centuries later, after the piece endured several peregrinations, the actor Richard Burton would purchase “La Peregrina”—which means “The Wanderer”—for his wife, the glamorous Elizabeth Taylor.

  The banns were read in English and in Latin, and Mary, lacking a male relative to stand up for her at the altar, was given away by four of her councilors, who were peers of the realm.

  Before Gardiner and the six other bishops who were officiating at the royal nuptials continued with the ceremony, the Bishop of Winchester made a speech to the assembled guests about the marriage treaty and announced Charles V’s gift to Philip of the kingdom of Naples.

  The couple exchanged vows in Latin and English, Mary pledging “from henceforth to be compliant and obedient . . . as much in mind as in body”—against Gardiner’s wishes, because he had insisted that Philip remain her subject as one of the terms of the marriage contract. Mary then vowed to endow Philip with all her “worldly goods,” although Philip promised only to endow his bride with all his “moveable goods.” According to a contemporary account, Mary’s wedding band “was a round hoop of gold without any stone, which was her desire, for she said she would be married as maidens were in the old time, and so she was.”

  However, even at the postceremonial banquet, one little detail revealed that it had not been a wedding of equals. Mary was served on gold dishes; Philip’s food was served on silver ones. After the formal feast, the bridal couple and their guests adjourned to an adjoining hall for more revelry. A letter from one John Elder gives another contemporary description of the reception—“such triumphing, banqueting, singing, masking and dancing, as was never seen in England heretofore, by the report of all men.”

  And no one nowadays thinks of Mary I as a party girl! Truth is, she was falling in love wit
h her husband and, at thirty-eight, was finally beginning to sense what it must be like to be a complete woman. Almost. There was still the wedding night and the forfeiture of her virginity to come. As one of Philip’s gentlemen wrote soon after the festivities wound down, “the Bishop of Winchester blessed the bed, and they remained alone. What happened that night only they know. If they give us a son, our joy will be complete.”

  But Mary’s warm and fuzzy feelings for Philip were not reciprocated. He was not merely unattracted to his wife; he found her physically distasteful. Four days after the wedding, his longtime adviser Ruy Gómez de Silva confided to a colleague in Brussels, “to speak frankly with you, it will take a great God to drink this cup [but] . . . the king realises that the marriage was concluded for no fleshly consideration, but in order to remedy the disorders of this kingdom and to preserve the Low Countries.” Philip did not have the guts to reveal to Mary that the Spanish—and most of all himself—viewed their union as purely political and that his father had counseled him to tarry in England for no more than five or six days after the wedding ceremony. After that, he had the business of Spain and the rest of the Hapsburg Empire to contend with, depending upon the assignment he received from the emperor.

  Too craven to confront Mary with the truth, Philip remained in England. Scholars posit that one reason he stayed was because Charles V, or his ministers, no longer saw the need for Philip to journey to the Netherlands to set up a satellite court there.

  The newlyweds honeymooned in Winchester for ten days and then headed toward London, stopping at Windsor and Richmond before making their grand entry into the capital.