Mary Tudor: The First Queen

by Linda Porter

  The international situation would loom large from the first days of the reign, but, for the present, it was only one of a myriad of policy areas demanding urgent attention. Mary had no time for contemplation, or to go over quietly in her own mind just how far she had come in the space of a mere fortnight. Her first council, numbering about 20 men, met before her entry to London. It was an interim body, but the business of government was pressing and there was, as she later told Renard, so much to do that she scarcely knew where to begin. Despite their differences and her mistrust of most of them, there was one outstanding consideration that united the queen and her advisers. Northumberland’s hour of reckoning was at hand.

  He and his sons were honourably treated during their imprisonment, but the Dudleys and their supporters were not among the inmates allowed to present themselves to Mary when she arrived at the Tower of London on 3 August. More fortunate beneficiaries of the old tradition that new monarchs should show clemency were four people who could not have expected early release while Northumberland remained in power. One was a woman, Mary’s old friend the duchess of Somerset, who went back to her family. She lived long into the Elizabethan period, dying in 1587. The other three were men. The youngest was Edward Courtenay, a distant cousin of Mary and son of Katherine of Aragon’s loyal supporter, Gertrude, marchioness of Exeter. His mother, her hopes suddenly raised for the future, rode proudly with Mary as she came into London. Also there when the queen entered the Tower were Stephen Gardiner, bishop of Winchester, and the old duke of Norfolk, who knelt now to do homage to the woman whose religious views he shared but whose prospects he had sought to destroy. Each man would play a prominent part in the first two years of Mary’s reign but, for the prelate and the senior aristocrat, there was no period of recuperation from their imprisonment. Gardiner was named Lord Chancellor and Norfolk, appointed High Steward, found himself on 18 August presiding, once more, over a showpiece trial.

  Nearly a month had elapsed since Northumberland’s arrest, more than sufficient time for him to decide that he would not submit without defence to a court of his peers. The conduct of his trial, which had as much to do with ritual as justice, impressed foreign observers with its solemnity.The English did these sorts of things very well:‘As your lordship knows,’ the merchant Antonio Guaras wrote to the duke of Alberquerque in Spain, ‘these proceedings are here conducted with great dignity.’29 Yet there was not the slightest doubt - except perhaps in Northumberland’s own mind - that he would be found guilty and condemned to die. The process by which this decision would be reached, however, was part of the spectacle.

  He kept his temper well under control as he faced the men who had deserted him. He came ‘with a good and intrepid countenance, full of humility and gravity’. His defence was simple and logical, if no doubt unpalatable to his audience. What had he done but to carry out the commands of Edward VI, in a manner agreed by all the council? If he was guilty of high treason, so were they. His claim that his actions were carried out under the broad seal of England was untrue, but the rest of his argument was perfectly sound. But it was never going to sway anyone.‘His peers beheld him with a severe aspect,’ Guaras noted.When the death sentence was pronounced he asked for, and was granted, a nobleman’s death. Then he made another, unexpected, request. Faced with the fast-approaching end of his life, he must think about his soul. So he asked ‘that I may have appointed to me some learned man for the instruction and quieting of my conscience’.The churchman who counselled him was Stephen Gardiner, a long-standing foe but a man who was suddenly restored to influence and power. Whether through personal anguish or political manoeuvring, Northumberland was about to give the new regime a huge propaganda victory.

  The most striking aspect of his behaviour, in the few days left to him, was the duke’s rejection of the religious beliefs he had done so much to impose on England during Edward’s reign. There has been a great deal of debate over whether his return to the Catholic faith was genuine or affected as a last-ditch attempt to be spared the axe. It is impossible to know what passed between him and the bishop or whether it had any part in the commutation of the death sentence on his eldest son. If he had also been promised mercy, he was to be disappointed. On 21 August, the day fixed for his execution, he took mass in the chapel of the Tower, telling those who came to observe his change of heart: ‘I do faithfully believe that this is the very right and true way, out of the which true religion you and I have been seduced these sixteen years past by the false and erroneous preaching of the new preachers, the which the only cause of the great plagues and vengeance which hath light upon the whole realm of England and now likewise worthily fallen upon me’.30 It is worth noting that his sons made no such expression of a change of faith.The words may have been supplied to him or they may have been his own. But any hopes that they might be the means of sparing his life were soon to be disappointed.The lord lieutenant of the Tower came to him later in the day to tell him to be prepared for death the next morning.

  What is more likely is that Northumberland did not want to die, and not just because he feared death, but because, as a servant of the Crown, he viewed it as a waste of his talents and experience.The desperate letter he is said to have penned on the last night of his life may not be genuine. It was addressed to Arundel, a man whom he had wronged and who was scarcely likely to intercede on his behalf, but some of its sentiments do reflect the image he had of himself. John Dudley knew he had misjudged Mary.Very well, it was a mistake, but he had acknowledged it and he could not see it as an impediment to serving her now she was queen. ‘Alas my good lord,’ the letter said,is my crime so heinous as no redemption but my blood can wash away the spots thereof? An old proverb there is and true that a living dog is better than a dead lion. O that it would please her good grace to give me life, yea, the life of a dog, that I might live and kiss her feet, and spend both life and all I have in her honourable service, as I have the best part already under her worthy brother and her most glorious father…O my good lord, remember how sweet life is and how bitter ye contrary …31

  In the end it was Jane Grey herself, the girl who, by his own admission, he had thrust into peril, who summed up his predicament as well as anyone. Her outraged eloquence betrays a depth of emotion that she seldom showed. ‘Woe worth him!’ she cried.

  He hath brought me and my stock in most miserable calamity and misery by his exceeding ambition. But for the answering that he hoped for his life by his turning, though other men be of that opinion, I utterly am not; for what man is there living, I pray you, although he had been innocent, that would hope of life in that case; being in the field against the queen in person as general, and after his taking, so hated and evil spoken of by the commons? … Who was judge that he should hope for pardon, whose life was odious to all men? But what will ye more? Like as his life was wicked and full of dissimulation, so was his end thereafter … Should I, who am young and in my few years, forsake my faith for the love of life? … But life was sweet, it appeared; so he might have lived, you will say, he did not care how.32

  Reluctant in the face of death and anguished in mind, Northumberland nevertheless affirmed at the end that his rediscovery of the old faith was personal and not the result of pressure. He said he had ‘no shame’ in returning to God.When he went to the scaffold on 22 August 1553, there was a large crowd present to see John Dudley die. An eyewitness description of his last moments captures the man, brave in public but still not quite accepting his fate.There are signs that he held out the hope of a reprieve right till the last moments:And as the bandage [blindfolding his eyes] was not well fitted when he was about to stretch himself upon the beam, he rose again upon his knees, and surely figured to himself the terrible dreadfulness of death. At the moment when he again stretched himself out, as one who constrained himself and willed to consent patiently, without saying anything, in the act of laying himself out … he smote his hands together, as one who should say, this must be …33

  So passed from th
is world one of the most enigmatic men of Tudor England. A competent rather than brilliant soldier but a politician of great skill and resolution, he was undone by one supreme error of judgement. He took longer than most to rise to a position of influence but could not imagine rescinding power once he had gained it.The council chamber was his natural milieu, a confined space where his serious and unyielding personality could intimidate men for whom he personally cared little. He had acquired wealth but lacked an affinity and learned the hard way from Mary, a woman he dismissed as a serious opponent, the value of loyal support. His downfall seemed a disaster for his large family and his wife never recovered from the loss of the man she called her most dear lord. She survived him by less than two years. In 1555 his heir, the earl of Warwick, died within 24 hours of being released from the Tower, to add to the family sorrows. But his other sons lived to restore their fortunes and Robert Dudley became the favourite of Elizabeth I, completing in her reign a century of Dudley service to the Crown. So, in the end, the dying wish of Northumberland, that his ‘childer’ would not suffer for their obedience to him, was fulfilled.

  Mary had shown mercy and restraint in her dealings with the politicians who had tried to keep her off the throne. This policy, advocated by Charles V and her own advisers, was expedient but could not be extended to Northumberland. He was the new regime’s priority in August, his execution an exemplary way of sending out the message that there would not be generalised retribution but that treason would not go unpunished. Once he had gone, Mary could move forward with confidence and begin to put in place her vision for England. She was the queen, but first she must be crowned.

  PART FOUR

  The Queen Without a King 1553-1554

  Chapter Eight

  Mary’s England

  ‘So, for good England’s sake, this present hour and day

  In hope of her restoring from her late decay

  We children, to you old folk, both with heart and voice,

  May join altogether to thank God and rejoice

  That he hath sent Mary, our sovereign queen,

  To reform the abuses which hitherto hath been.’

  Prologue to Respublica-a drama of Real Life in the early days of Queen Mary

  When Mary was proclaimed in London on the afternoon of 19 July it was more than a vindication of her courageous and principled fight for the throne. Her victory underscored the legitimacy of statute law as laid out in the Act of Succession of 1543 and conformed to the wishes of Henry VIII that the succession should pass to his own children before others were considered.The new queen’s titles demonstrated the extent of her power and responsibilities, in matters temporal and spiritual. She was ‘Mary by the grace of God Queen of England, France and Ireland, defender of the faith, and in the earth supreme head of the Church of England and Ireland’. This impressive statement of regal might contained elements that spoke to both the past and the present and was what the majority of Mary’s ‘true and faithful’ subjects expected to hear.Yet it posed several important questions about how the queen would rule that would demand answers sooner rather than later.

  One part, of course, was little more than wishful thinking. The English lands in France had dwindled to Calais and its surrounding area, but the claim remained, a survivor of centuries of enmity that would be reignited during Mary’s reign. Ireland, on the other hand, was a newcomer to the titular display of the English monarchs.There had been a presence there, often uneasy and fragmented, since the Norman conquest, but only in 1541 did Mary’s father, unwilling to settle for just being its Lord, add the title of King of Ireland to his style. The principality of Wales, in which the queen’s dynasty originated, no longer merited a separate mention; it, too, was only recently united by statute law with England.1

  Geographically, Mary’s kingdom was small. Scotland was, quite literally, another country, a natural ally of France and a constant thorn in the side of its southern neighbour. The marriage of Mary’s aunt, Margaret Tudor, to James IV of Scotland as long ago as 1503 had not succeeded in bringing about a warmer relationship between the courts of Edinburgh and London, and both regarded each other with suspicion when not involved in outright hostilities.The creation of a Great Britain lay in the future.

  The realm in 1553 was a hybrid of the Gaelic Irish, the Welsh and the English, but it was the voices of the English which were most often heard, and England was the centre of the monarch’s power. It was home to just under three million people, a population that actually declined in the 1550s as the result of famine and deadly epidemics, though numbers recovered strongly by the end of Elizabeth’s reign.2 London, its largest city, had 60,000 inhabitants, but this was unimpressive by European standards; the population of Paris was three times greater. Nowhere else in Mary’s kingdom came near to London in size - even at the end of the 16th century, Dublin was a small town of only 6,000 people.

  Perhaps because it was small in both area and population, England had a long tradition of unified central government, and in this centrality lay the key to its identity. The country was defined by the things it had in common: its language, its laws and its coinage. In the provinces, local men might have the power to exercise the law, but the commands they enacted came from Westminster, where an assiduous civil service made sure that the justices of the peace and lords lieutenant of the shires knew what was expected of them. Only rarely, as with the East Anglian and Thames Valley risings in support of Mary, did the centre find itself challenged.

  It was a strongly administered country, but one that had seen enormous change in the 20 years before Mary’s accession. She herself had direct, uncomfortable experience of the impact of the religious upheaval and she now found herself head of a Church whose beliefs she did not share and whose leaders she despised.The Edwardian regime had moved much faster and much further than the majority of the population wanted. In reforming the liturgy it had removed a great deal that was familiar and deprived the congregation of what many of them saw as the mystery and beauty of the experience of worship. Cranmer and others believed passionately that the immediacy of God’s word, rendered into English that all could understand, was far more beautiful than the ornaments, altarpieces and carvings that Edward’s commissioners stripped from the churches. The religious processions, observance of saints’ days, strict adherence to Lenten dieting and, above all, the inaccessibility of holy communion on a regular basis, all these things were viewed as detrimental to a godly society by the supporters of the new learning.

  The changes had begun under Henry VIII but their acceleration between 1547 and 1553 was the result of legislation imposed from on high. It could not, in the space of just six years, banish the beliefs or customs of centuries. People were reluctant to break the law, but they resented what had been taken from them. Many still thought as Mary did. They did not view her, as so many historians have done, as going backwards, but as someone who could pick up again the interrupted pattern of religion in their daily lives.The transition for such people was easily achieved. As Lord Rich wrote, in respect of a kinsman who believed that he was not in favour with the queen: ‘He is as willing as any man to hear mass.’And so were countless others.

  If people’s consciences were mobile, so was the society in which they lived. Mid-Tudor England saw much more movement, both up and down the social ladder, than has generally been realised. People did not stay in one place all their lives. They might not go any great distance, perhaps no more than five or ten miles from where they were born, but most moved at least once. Only the very rich or very poor migrated long distances. Those who did tended to leave the north and west for the more prosperous south and east of England, a trend that has not changed in 450 years. The cosy image of close-knit villages dotted over a rural landscape, where generations of the same family lived and died together, is a myth. Extended families were most unusual. Households generally consisted of a husband and wife, their children and their servants. To ensure that they were in a position to establish themselves ind
ependently, both men and women often waited until they were in their late twenties to marry. Given that life expectancy was only in the high thirties, death often parted couples before they had much time together.

  England was an agrarian society but it was not a subsistence economy with a fixed peasantry. In the countryside as well as the towns, people made things that they could trade.Yet life was far from easy.Wide-scale enclosures, depriving the common people of their rights to forage and graze animals, had led to social unrest, as in the risings of 1549. Prices rose sharply during the reign of Henry VIII and the coinage had been several times debased, a combination that only increased hardship. Both of Mary’s predecessors died in debt, mostly as a result of the expensive and inconclusive wars of the 1540s. All the wealth from the religious establishments that Thomas Cromwell had worked so hard to put in the Crown’s coffers had been dissipated.

  Beyond these man-made difficulties were other disasters that only God, it was believed, could influence. The vagaries of the weather were a constant concern, since failed harvests could cause starvation that decimated large areas of the country. Prolonged periods of torrential rain were a feature of Mary’s reign, especially in the years 1554-6. Her future husband, Philip, arrived from the warm climate of Spain in July 1554 to be greeted when he landed at Southampton by pelting rain.The downpours did not let up for their wedding day, either. But the worse was yet to come. At the end of September 1555 the country experienced ‘the greatest rains and floods that ever were seen in England.The low countries in divers places were drowned, and both men and cattle. All the marshes near London … and all the cellars with beers and wine and other wares and merchandise in them drowned also.The rains … continued to March 18 [1556]: not ten days together fair.’3