Mary Tudor: The First Queen

by Linda Porter

  In other respects, her first pronouncements on religion indicated moderation.While arguing for Edward to be buried in the observances of the old religion, she also told Renard ‘she wished to force no one to go to mass, but meant to see that those who wished to should be free to do so’. She went on to tell him that she would soon issue a public proclamation to that effect, though he noted her emotional attachment to the Holy Sacrament that was kept on an altar in her chamber. Nor did she hide it in the wording of the proclamation itself.

  This was issued from Richmond on 18 August and, as Mary’s first official pronouncement on religion, it was carefully scrutinised. The wording, which was probably drafted by Gardiner, combines the queen’s personal affirmation of her faith with a more pragmatic and - for the 16th century—surprisingly tolerant outlook towards those whose views differed from her own:… Her majesty, being presently by the only goodness of God settled in the just possession of this realm … cannot now hide that religion which God and the world knoweth she hath ever professed from her infancy hitherto, which as her majesty is minded to observe and maintain for herself by God’s grace during her times, so doth her highness much desire and would be glad the same were of all her subjects quietly and charitably embraced.

  Though some, she realised, would not follow her example: ‘And yet she doth signify unto all her majesty’s said loving subjects that of her most gracious disposition and clemency her highness mindeth not to compel any her said subjects thereunto until such time as further order by common assent may be taken therein’. She closed by commanding everyone ‘to live in quiet sort and Christian charity’.

  The sting of this proclamation was in its tail. Mary had signalled the direction in which she would go by leaving open the door for further, more direct steps to be taken in the restoration of Catholicism. There was to be no sweeping change imposed just yet, but the impression remained that this was an interim measure, not the end of the story. Other measures spelled out the likely direction. A crackdown on ‘those without sufficient authority to preach and to interpret the word of God’ was reinforced by a ban on the ‘playing of interludes and printing of false fond books, ballads, hymns and other lewd treatises in the English tongue’. The wording may sound quaint, but the intention was clear. Protestantism was equated with sedition.This link was established early and continued throughout Mary’s reign.

  Nor was this all. The queen had already gone one step further than anyone, even the imperial ambassadors who clung to her so closely, knew. She was already in correspondence with the pope, asking him to lift the edicts that had been imposed when her father broke away from Rome, as a precursor to the full restoration of papal authority. At the beginning of August, a rather startled Julius III received her announcement of her accession, and the first notification that Mary intended to give up her title as head of the Church of England. In fact, he was so taken aback by this personal contact that for a while he did very little about it, beyond sending a cardinal to London with instructions to find out what was actually happening there.The pope’s response was cautious but the reaction of Mary’s cousin, Reginald Pole, the son of her old lady governess, was one of boundless joy. He wrote to Julius III at the beginning of August: ‘I cannot delay congratulating your Holiness until the receipt of further intelligence, the nature of the event appearing to me such that since many years nothing has occurred in Christendom on which one could more reasonably congratulate a Christian mind … and God of his goodness … has chosen to annihilate all these long cherished projects by means of a woman who for so many years has suffered contrary to all justice’.13

  He had been away many years himself, and scarcely knew the country he left behind in 1532. Margaret Pole’s third, cleverest son was now more Italian than English, both in outlook and appearance.Yet though he had spent such a long time in the service of Rome, he signally failed to seize the chance of the papacy which so nearly became his in 1549, following the death of Pope Paul III.Whether through too much complacency or a lack of political skill, he was outfoxed by the Italian cardinal Giovanni del Monte, who became pope as Julius III. Disliked and distrusted by both the French and the Habsburgs, Pole found his career seemingly going nowhere until his distant cousin, Mary Tudor, achieved the apparently impossible and became queen of England. Suddenly, an entirely different prospect opened up, and he hastened to remind the new queen of the sufferings of his family, the Poles, which her father had sought to exterminate. ‘Her majesty will perceive’, he wrote to Mary, ‘that the beginning and cause of all the evil … placed in the heart of the king her father [was] the perverse desire to make the divorce from the queen her mother.’ No doubt Mary did perceive it that way, but she may not have known that Reginald Pole had certainly not stood out against the divorce initially and had actually undertaken missions on Henry’s behalf to facilitate it. So his subsequent assertion that he had risked his life in Katherine and Mary’s defence was a convenient rewriting of his past, a talent that he possessed in considerable measure. He exhorted her to obedience to the Church, something in which she needed little encouragement, and closed by expressing his wish to come at once to England. But he was to be thwarted in this desire by the emperor and by English politicians, who were not keen to see him back on English soil. Eighteen months would pass before he returned as Mary’s archbishop of Canterbury, by which time she had put in place most of the central pillars of her religious policy without him.

  The evidence suggests that Mary’s own view of religion in England when she came to the throne was in the course of development. Her anxiety to be rid of the title of head of the Church may have been as much psychological as devotional. Its connotations with the outcome of the divorce, with her own troubles in the 1530s and, above all, with her father were very uncomfortable. As with the declaration of her own bastardy, something that troubled her greatly and could not be undone except through Parliament, Mary wanted to cleanse her past. But this does not mean that she wanted to turn back the clock to the way religion had been practised in 1529. She had been educated by those who believed in the need for reform in Catholicism and seems to have been perfectly comfortable with many aspects of the Henrician settlement. It was the attempt to impose the much more radical ideas of the reformers under her brother that she had opposed, not the religious framework Henry VIII bequeathed in 1547. The mass satisfied the core of her own spiritual needs, enveloping her in its central mystery of the real presence of Christ.To deny that miracle was to her the greatest heresy of all. She could not understand those who believed otherwise. She cared nothing for what they called themselves: sacramentarians, Lutherans, Calvinists, Zwinglians, any of the still-splintering sects that were bundled together under the catch-all term of Protestant, they were simply unbelievers to Mary and to countless other Englishmen. Hundreds of years would pass before the notion of respecting those who held different ideas became accepted or admired. Mary was a 16th—century woman. She did not think as we do.

  Her policies on religion were still evolving in the autumn of 1553. There had been little time to develop a detailed template and she could not ignore the pressing needs of establishing herself as queen. Shortly after her coronation, she wrote to her cousin Cardinal Pole, dashing his hopes of immediate, wholesale change. Acknowledging their kinship (he was, she wrote, ‘joined to her by nature’), she nevertheless realised the need to proceed with care, describing ‘what pain the queen feels from being as yet unable by any fitting means to manifest the whole intent of her heart in this matter’.14

  But some of the policies she would pursue were already well formed in her mind. She wanted a more literate clergy, who could inspire the people through good sermons. This had long been felt to be a notable weakness of the Catholic Church in England. At parish level priests were often ill educated and they were not trained to engage their congregations through the power of preaching.The success of the Protestants in this respect was plainly seen.To compete, Mary’s clergy must be supplied with material that the
y could use in the preparation of their own sermons.The printing press, that tool of the seditious, could also be used to propound effectively the ideas of an English Catholicism. Time was taken in preparation, but the Marian period produced a substantial body of homilies and reference material, much of it from the pen of Edmund Bonner, the bishop of London. It was printed by the queen’s printer, Robert Caly, from his press in St Paul’s churchyard.

  Mary also felt strongly about married priests. Her disapproval has been equated with sexual prudery, but this seems too modern an interpretation. It was a distaste that her sister Elizabeth shared, but she has not been criticised for it in such highly coloured terms. Marriage to Mary was an institution blessed by God, and one for which she had great reverence, like all people of her time. But it was not appropriate for priests because it destroyed the uniqueness of their relationship with God. In that sense, perhaps, she did consider that married priests were defiled, but this does not mean that she nursed lurid fantasies of what went on in priestly bedrooms.The importance she attached to the mass in her daily life meant that she expected complete moral purity in those who administered it. No action was taken in the first nine months of the reign, but in March 1554 Mary issued an instruction ordering every bishop ‘to deprive or declare deprived, and remove according to their learning and discretion, all such persons from their benefices or ecclesiastical promotions, who contrary to the … laudable custom of the church, have married and used women as their wives’.15 Among those affected by this pronouncement was the 67—year—old archbishop of York, who wrote in bewilderment asking what he should do with his wife, whom he had married only a few years earlier because, he claimed, of pressure from the Edwardian authorities.

  But Mary accepted reluctantly, as she informed Reginald Pole, that she could not move too fast. Her advisers were even more concerned about the implications of swift religious change. Some Protestants might wait and see what she would do but others were eager to make their opposition apparent from the first days of her rule. Simon Renard believed that much of this disaffection stemmed from foreign radicals who lived in London: ‘Frenchmen, Germans and Flemings exiled and thrust out of their own countries for heresy and other crimes’. Such troublemakers evidently feared that they would now be compelled to leave the country and ‘would do nothing except seek opportunities for troubling the queen’s reign’.16 When he gave Mary this opinion, she may well have wondered how someone so recently arrived in England could really know about the frame of mind of its overseas inhabitants. Her own account of the situation was more detailed and accurate than Renard’s. She was, she said, well aware of the situation in London and even that one of her own guard had cursed Bishop Gardiner. Security was the responsibility of the appropriate authorities. She had left the mayor and aldermen of London to deal with ‘the administration of justice, the police and the maintenance of peace among her subjects’. Until Parliament was called, she would not constrain any of her subjects on matters of religion.This was certainly what the anxious imperialists, afraid that a bombastic approach to religious change might jeopardise a fragile monarchy, wanted to hear. It was not by any means a statement of personal belief. Mary could be pragmatic when the situation demanded it.

  The reminder that there was a substantial and vocal foreign element in London was unnecessary. Mary was already thinking about the international situation and the importance of diplomatic affairs. There was a flurry of activity about the appointment of an ambassador to France at the end of July, before Mary reached London.This indicates the queen’s determination to establish her authority with the French, who had been too close to Northumberland, and to take the initiative in Anglo-French relations in a positive way. Sir Anthony St Leger was sent on a special mission to announce Mary’s accession to the French court. When he arrived at Compiègne he found the French willing to play their part in observing the diplomatic niceties, reporting that Montmorency, the constable of France, ‘received her majesty’s letter very joyously’.17 The French government was keen to extricate itself from any suspicion of having backed the wrong claimant; Henry II sent new credentials to Antoine de Noailles on 29 July.The day after her triumphant entry into London, Mary received Noailles, together with the French ambassador to Scotland. Noailles, with a charming touch of Gallic gallantry, duly reported in his account of the meeting that Mary and her ladies had been grandly dressed in cloth of gold and bright colours, with very large sleeves in the French fashion. His comments show that Mary knew how to look like a queen, as well as act like one. A few days later, the French ambassador was invited to dine at the Tower with the council. He evidently appreciated these attempts to include him, but though he may have welcomed assurances from Gardiner and Paget that Mary wanted peace with France, he was less convinced by their pronouncement that she would not favour her Habsburg relatives over France.18

  Noailles himself had been in England only since May 1553, but though his position might seem difficult, he was well provided for by his government, with plenty of money at his disposal and a network of spies and messengers who kept him informed. He was also in close touch with d’Oysel, the ambassador to Scotland, who could give moral support and supply information from his own sources. He clearly was not in a position to influence Mary, nor was he expected to; the main part of his brief was to protect French interests, particularly if they were threatened by closer ties between England and the empire. And he could, through careful management of his agents, influence what was happening in England. As the autumn turned to winter in 1553, his ability to manipulate would become much more apparent.

  French concerns over Mary’s preferences in Europe were understandable, and her partiality for the imperialists has been noted ever after. The queen’s dependency, so the argument runs, started in her formative years when Charles V became her putative father, continued under various imperial ambassadors, notably Eustace Chapuys and Simon Renard, and reached its height when she married Philip of Spain. In this interpretation, Mary appears as a woman constantly being used by others, trapped by her own emotions and inexperience in a pattern of behaviour that deprived her of any independence of thought, and out of tune with the interests of England. While it cannot be denied that the emperor’s main interest in Mary had always been political rather than personal, she was still a member of his family, and dynasty was a concept that overrode everything else with Charles V. He treated his sisters and his daughters in the same way, as extensions of his own power and surrogates for him in the government of his huge territories. And it was true that he had been the only figure outside her household who took a sustained interest in Mary’s life and whose views, particularly on religion and society, matched her own. Theirs was a shared heritage and it was inconceivable that Mary should have wanted to distance herself from it. It is equally a mistake to dismiss her as having no background in international affairs. Much of her life had been spent on the European stage, as the discussions about her marriage ebbed and flowed over the years. She did not take any direct part in the conduct of diplomacy until she became queen but she was a well-informed, if not impartial, observer.

  The Anglo-Habsburg alliance, so often described as being damaging to England’s international prospects and emerging nationhood, was nothing new. In fact, it was a key element of the foreign policy of Henry VII, Mary’s grandfather, and though Henry VIII had stretched imperial patience, he fought wars with England’s traditional enemies, France and Scotland, never with Charles V. Mary’s desire to align herself with her cousin was a product of continuity, not of regression. But it did also have, for her, a very strong element of loyalty and gratitude. Though a monarch in her own right, she clearly never thought of herself as his equal. She was thrilled when he wrote her letters in his own hand, which apparently he had seldom done before.19

  CharlesV was ruler of much of the Western world in 1553, and Mary’s unexpected accession offered him unforeseen possibilities for shoring up his influence in north-western Europe. Yet his cousin’s su
ccess was a cause for relief rather than unbridled enthusiasm. It removed the threat that England would side with the French, a cause of concern when EdwardVI was king, and it opened up the possibility that both the queen and her sister might make useful marriages. Precisely how this might be taken forward would have to wait until after the coronation, but the manoeuvring had already begun.There were candidates both in England and in his own family but, for the moment, the emperor was content not to reveal his hand fully, to anyone. His attention to matters of state depended on his health; more than 30 years of the inescapable demands of warfare and government had reduced him to a physical wreck. The onset of autumn made those around him anxious, knowing the dismal prospects he faced in the cold winters of Brussels. He had gout in every limb, nerve and joint of his body, even the back of his neck. Catarrh meant that he often could not speak and, when he did, he could hardly be heard. Haemorrhoids, it was reported, ‘swell and torment him so much that he cannot turn without great pain and tears’. He might be the most powerful man in Europe, but he longed for respite from all these afflictions and the severe depression that accompanied them.This had ‘altered his character’, and he was often sunk in a melancholy that neither of his sisters, Mary of Hungary and Eleanor of France, could alleviate. 20 Their cousin, who had suffered much herself, was now queen of England, and this provided some small comfort. But it could not disguise the fact that the Habsburg family endured, rather than enjoyed, power.

  Mary was aware that Charles suffered from gout, but she probably did not know the full extent of his woes or that business ground to a halt when his health was especially bad. Her memory of him was that of her early childhood, when he was young and vigorous. He was her family and her natural ally; their interests were not always identical but in matters of international importance she was always likely to follow his lead. She needed no encouragement from his ambassadors. Yet Simon Renard, who did not set foot in England till early July and who had no knowledge of the country other than that gleaned from conversations with Scheyfve, was never shy of giving advice to the queen on every aspect of her policy, both national and European. Just how much faith she put in him is not easy to determine, since he was very good at self-promotion and it suited his interests to represent Mary as leaning heavily on him for all sorts of guidance and information. It is clear from the evidence of her own handwritten notes that she did talk to him frequently during the autumn of 1553. These meetings were often, but not exclusively, private, and this has led to the assumption that he was leading her rather than the other way round, but then this is the impression that he wanted to convey when he wrote back to Brussels.There is probably very little that he introduced into their conversations that did not match the way her own thoughts were already developing, even when these encompassed Tudor, as well as Habsburg, family matters. And it was here that he probably did the most lasting damage.