Mary Tudor: The First Queen

by Linda Porter

  Blue cloth had been laid from the marble porch of Westminster Hall to the pulpit in the abbey, railed on either side. Along this passed the queen’s procession, beginning with the gentlemen, by twos, and then the knights, aldermen, the French and Latin secretaries, the privy council, the knights of the Garter and three naked swords, representing Justice (one for the Spirituality and one for the Temporality) and Mercy. The sword of state was carried by Edward Courtenay, newly ennobled as earl of Devonshire.The duke of Norfolk carried the crown and the marquess of Winchester the orb, while the earl of Arundel bore the sceptre. The queen’s train was carried by the duchess of Norfolk, assisted by Sir John Gage. According to Noailles, Elizabeth and Anne of Cleves immediately followed the queen into the abbey, but there is no other corroboration of this.

  The ancient abbey of Westminster was richly decorated for Mary Tudor’s coronation. The pulpit was covered with red worsted and the stage royal from the choir to the high altar covered with cloth of gold and strewn with cushions of the same material.When the queen reached the mounting scaffold she went up seven stairs to sit on a great royal chair, covered with damasked cloth of gold. The chair was backed with pillars,‘whereon stood two lions of gold and in the midst of a turret with a fleur-de-lys of gold’.38

  Once the queen was seated, the bishop of Winchester turned to the assembled grandees of England, with the words:‘Sirs, here present is Mary, rightful and undoubted inheritrix by the laws of God and man to the crown and royal dignity of this realm of England, France and Ireland, whereupon you shall understand that this day is appointed by the peers of this land for the consecration, inunction and coronation of said most excellent Princess Mary; will you serve at this time, and give your wills and assent to the same’. The people answered, ‘Yea, yea, yea. God save Queen Mary.’ After the acclamation, Mary gave her offering to God (20 shillings) and later lay prostrate on cushions while prayers were said over her. She then rose to listen to the sermon from the bishop of Chichester. It was on the obedience due to kings, an apposite topic, but the bishop was not, by some accounts, the most lively or concise of speakers, and his audience’s powers of concentration may have been taxed by his delivery.39

  By now the ceremony was entering its most sacred phase. Mary swore her oaths lying before the altar and was then anointed by Gardiner, on the forehead, temples, shoulders and breasts, using the holy oil so lately arrived from Flanders. Lord Paget, Sir Thomas Cheyney, Sir John Gage and Sir Anthony St Leger held a canopy over the queen, allowing her some privacy, and she had facilitated the anointing by changing into a sleeveless corset of purple velvet and a robe of white taffeta.When Gardiner had dried her with a linen cloth, Frances Waldegrave stepped forward to lace up her mistress’s apparel, put on her hands a pair of linen gloves and drape her in a crimson velvet mantle. On Mary’s feet were slippers of crimson cloth of gold lined with crimson satin, decorated with ribbons of Venice gold. Thus gorgeously attired, she was crowned by Gardiner with the three crowns, while trumpets sounded between each crowning.When the gold coronation ring, familiarly known as the wedding ring of England, was put on her finger, the Te Deum was sung by the abbey choir. Then, as would have been done for a male monarch, she was accoutred with the sword and the spurs, and received the homage of her bishops and peers, who knelt and kissed her on the left cheek. As proceedings drew to a close, she made further offerings of bread, a cruet of wine and a pound of gold.

  It was a long and arduous ceremony, demanding much of the woman at its centre. At about four o’clock Mary emerged, exalted, as sovereign queen of England. She carried the orb and the two sceptres, as both king and queen, the time-honoured symbols of her spiritual and worldly power. Still overcome with emotion as the reality of the ceremony sank in, she played absent-mindedly with the orb as she returned for the coronation dinner. Here, while more than three hundred dishes were offered to the normally abstemious Mary, who presumably tasted only a fraction of them, the ancient practices were enjoyed by the other diners. Gardiner, Elizabeth and Anne of Cleves, who all sat at the queen’s table, watched as her champion, Sir Edward Dymoke, rode up and down the hall challenging anyone who questioned her right. She drank to him and gave him the cup and his horse’s splendid trappings as his fee.

  Her subjects, with the customary unruliness of the London crowd on such occasions, were determined to celebrate in their own way. Their priority was to take anything of value that remained from the street decorations and to scramble for the leftover meats from the meal, which were traditionally thrown out to anyone prepared to struggle for them. On this occasion, there was a near-riot. It was a far from dignified end to an otherwise solemn day.

  When Mary retired to bed at Westminster that night, after further feasting, music and dancing, she had good cause to be satisfied with what had been achieved in the first two and a half months of her reign. But there was also uneasiness in her mind, and uncertainty.When Parliament met on 5 October, she intended to introduce a programme of political and religious change which she hoped would not meet with opposition. But there was one other, fundamentally important issue that could no longer be avoided now she was crowned, and that was to find a suitable husband. It was not a quest for which she felt the slightest enthusiasm.

  Chapter Nine

  Wyatt’s Rebellion

  ‘Lo now, even at hand, Spaniards be already arrived at Dover.’

  Proclamation of Sir Thomas Wyatt the younger at Maidstone, 25 January 1554

  The question of marriage had first been raised more than two months earlier, before Mary even entered London. It was not instigated by the queen herself, or even by her privy councillors, who were otherwise preoccupied in late July. Renard took the credit for introducing the idea at his initial audience with the queen at New Hall, on 29 July. To the English and their new monarch it was only one among many topics for consideration, and not the most pressing. But to the imperialists, it was the key to their policy, an unforeseen and God-given opportunity to swing the balance of power in their long-standing quarrels with France.There was one obvious solution that the emperor sought and it must be pursued carefully, but inexorably.

  As soon as the coronation was over, Mary knew she could not put off any longer dealing with the marriage issue, distasteful as it was.The pressure from her councillors was mounting. She must come to a decision, first as to whether she should marry at all and, if she decided she must, who her husband was to be.The queen reluctantly reached the conclusion that she could not remain single, and the process caused her a great deal of emotional turmoil, but once her mind was made up she proceeded with a ruthless determination to get her way. The major difficulty she encountered was in the manner that this was publicly presented. She felt that, as the queen, she should not have to justify her decision to her country. Her coronation oath was sufficient proof of her responsibility. She would neither be denied nor contradicted, and she most certainly would not let anyone in England presume to tell her what she should do.

  Initially, she was just as concerned by the insistence of the emperor’s representatives that she must consider her situation without loss of time, telling them: ‘She felt confident you would remember that she was 37 years of age and would not urge her to come to a decision before having seen the person and heard him speak, for as she was marrying against her private inclination she trusted your majesty would give her a suitable match.’ Her first letter as queen to Charles V, written several days later, was full of expressions of humble thanks for his congratulations on her accession, but it did not mention marriage at all.1

  So this first comment on her marital status and prospects reveals a great deal about Mary’s frame of mind and her anxieties about becoming a wife when she was no longer a young woman. It was unthinkable that she could discuss her fears or reveal her embarrassment to a privy council composed of men. If she had to submit herself to the marriage bed, then she understandably wanted to be sure that she felt comfortable in her choice of spouse. She was realistic enough to acc
ept that her personal attractions were fading and that the prospect of motherhood could not be the same as if she were ten years younger. Unmentioned, but accepted by everyone, Mary included, was the more serious prospect of death in childbirth, supposing that she did conceive. Nevertheless, she believed that God, who had shown her such favour in this momentous year of 1553, would extend his blessing and give her offspring, safeguarding her throne, her religion and her succession. But her first thought was that the best chance of contentment lay with with a husband near to her in age and interests, whom she might have the opportunity to meet before finally making up her mind. He must, of course, be Catholic, but that now went without saying. There were plenty of prospects who shared her faith.Yet some of the names being put forward, she told the imperial ambassador, were totally inappropriate. She was ‘old enough to be their mother’. It was a revealing comment.

  Charles V, however, was dismayed by her insistence that she wanted to inspect potential husbands beforehand. The emperor did not think that any European prince would be willing to submit himself to the possible indignity of being rejected. He may have been wrong about this, since there was no shortage of candidates for Mary’s hand.The illegitimate ex-princess with the vague title of ‘The Lady Mary’ was suddenly a queen, and she might make her husband a king. Her suitors were a motley bunch, every bit as eccentric as some of those who would court her sister in years to come, and often just as unsuitable.

  They split into two broad groups, the English and the foreign, and there was keen rivalry within, as well as between, the groups. Even Habsburg unity broke down in the face of fraternal squabbles. The emperor knew what he wanted but reaching a satisfactory outcome would not necessarily be straightforward. Affairs needed to be handled delicately, and he instructed Renard to conduct the negotiations without taking Scheyfve and the other ambassadors, who did not leave England till mid-October, into his confidence. This caused friction within the imperial embassy in London. Charles could live with this, but he was furious when he discovered that his brother, Ferdinand, King of the Romans, was energetically pushing the claims of his own second son as a rival to Philip and had written personally to Mary. He gave clear instructions to his sibling to desist that were not well received. Meanwhile, his brother-in-law, the long-unmarried Dom Luis of Portugal, resurfaced with a new-found devotion to Mary’s person as well as her money. He, too, had to be deterred from pursuing his interest, since in age and outlook he was by far the closest to Mary’s criteria for an ideal husband.

  There were also three English contenders, one serious and the other two improbable.The main prospect was thought to be Edward Courtenay, recently ennobled as earl of Devon, but Cardinal Pole and the son of the earl of Arundel were also mentioned as possibilities. Pole was six years older than Mary and an unlikely choice, whatever ties she felt to him as distant kin and to his mother, her executed lady governess. Though he was a cardinal, he had never been ordained as a priest and could still, in theory, marry. But he wanted to govern a revitalised Catholic Church in England rather than share his cousin Mary’s throne. Arundel’s son, Lord Maltravers, was sometimes spoken of as a suitor for Elizabeth, rather than Mary, and his name may have been put in the frame by those who wished to represent his father as being over-ambitious. Courtenay, though, was a much more serious prospect and the choice of many in government and the royal household who wanted an Englishman, not a foreigner, as Mary’s spouse.

  Mary herself desired, above all, someone with whom she could live in harmony and who would be a constant presence in her life. She does not seem to have accepted that this latter requirement could only realistically be met by marriage to one of her own countrymen.Though she acknowledged that marrying was a duty she owed to England, she was also adamant that the selection of a husband was a personal and intensely private process. She would be mindful of the advantages that her choice could offer her country, but she always intended for her English advisers to follow her lead, not express opinions of their own. CharlesV might make suggestions, she told Renard, and she would be happy to follow them, provided she could accommodate her own concerns about marriage.The problem with this approach was its major element of self-deception, since the emperor was not a disinterested party. He already knew how he was going to handle the question, and Mary must at least have guessed what he would propose. At one and the same time, she wanted complete freedom to make her decision and yet to have it come from someone else. To the queen, the process was disturbingly stressful, and she was genuinely anguished, as her behaviour in October revealed.

  Nor was there anyone else apart from the emperor to whom she could turn for advice. ‘She would never dare raise the subject with her council,’ she claimed, somewhat disingenuously, and she declared that ‘she had never felt that which was called love, nor harboured any thoughts of voluptuousness … wherefore her own marriage would be against her inclinations’. But she went on to reveal that, in the privacy of her chamber, ‘the ladies who surrounded her talked of nothing else but marriage’.2 This female chattering and encouragement were evidently a great influence on the queen, who could have put a stop to them if she wished but did nothing to discourage them. Many of her women were married, or had been, and they were her main source of information on just what it meant to be a wife.When she told Renard that she had never felt sexual desire she did not mean that she was completely ignorant about sex. Mary refrained from saying so directly, of course, but sex was obviously her main area of concern. She would not be marrying for love, but reproduction was a wifely duty and she was reliant on her ladies to explain the essentials. Her comments indicate that they tried to bolster her resolution by romantic gossip and speculation about the bridegroom’s identity.They were concerned about the queen’s happiness and well aware that she was uneasy about what lay ahead.Yet even within Mary’s chamber, there were disagreements about whom their lady should marry.Without saying so publicly, the queen already accepted in her heart that she could not marry a subject. Whatever others might want for her, no matter how strong the case they put for her to marry within the realm, she would not wed an Englishman.

  Though Mary was encouraged towards a foreign match by CharlesV and his ambassador, she reached her conclusion independently. She told Renard in September that ‘she knew no one in England with whom she would wish to ally herself’. He could not have been surprised, as he had earlier described her to the bishop of Arras, to whom he wrote more frankly than the emperor, as ‘great-hearted, proud and magnanimous. If she married an Englishman, her posterity would not have as much renown as if her husband were a foreign prince.’3 In making this observation, Renard displayed a greater grasp of the queen’s character and outlook than many of those who had been around her for years. But he did not comprehend the full picture. As Mary tried to cope with her emotions, only superficially distracted by her ladies and their ceaseless talk of weddings, she came to believe that what was right for her was right for England. A well-chosen, carefully negotiated marriage would raise her country’s stock in Europe, putting it at the centre, rather than the periphery, of European politics. No longer a pariah state, it would be a godly, Catholic country with voice and influence, prosperous and well governed.This was her vision for her country and she was committed to its achievement. Her own happiness would flow naturally from the realisation of this goal. History, temperament and a consciousness that hers was a unique situation, an unequalled opportunity, propelled Mary towards an inevitable choice. She would marry the emperor’s son, Philip of Spain.

  Once the queen persuaded herself that she must accept God’s intention for her to marry - and it was an age when everyone expected monarchs to marry and produce children, bachelor kings being virtually unknown - the dynastic choice was an obvious one.The most difficult part for Mary, as she had already made clear, was facing up to the fact that marriage was her duty, just as much as government and religion.

  The reaction to her choice has been misunderstood. Strong feelings were aroused
but much of the passion evaporated by the time the queen finally went to the altar in the summer of 1554. Political rivalries, religious differences, self-interest and uncertainties about the role of a female ruler were more potent than the simplistic hatred of all things Spanish that has so often been asserted as the sole cause of opposition to Mary’s determination to marry Philip of Spain. But this was still one of the most divisive decisions of her reign. Mary’s determination to pursue the matter in its early stages with only the minimum of consultation has been depicted as a sign of uncertainty and weakness. In fact, it shows an almost arrogant confidence in her role as a monarch. Yet there is no denying the impact, not just of the choice but the way in which it was handled. Mary wanted to make up her mind alone. Pestered by Renard to make a foreign match and her household staff to make an English one, it is hardly surprising that the queen grew overwrought. No matter what she decided, she knew that many people would disapprove.

  She was quite right. The issue of Mary’s marriage led to rifts in the council and destroyed the influence of some of the foremost members of her household, who had served her faithfully for years. Another casualty was the Lady Elizabeth, whose fragile relationship with Mary went downhill rapidly in October 1553, as the queen struggled to retain her composure. In thinking of her future, Mary was unable to avoid the past. Elizabeth could not escape the fact that her mother was Anne Boleyn. The fact that the divorce was overturned by Mary’s first parliament, in November, gave the queen great satisfaction, but the scars remained.