Mary Tudor: The First Queen

by Linda Porter

  The epidemic came after a year of good harvests and was particularly deadly among the well-nourished ruling class. This points to it being a new type of virus, probably related to influenza. It was certainly not the plague, whose symptoms were well known and recognised, nor does it seem to have been an outbreak of the sweating sickness, which had last visited England in 1551. The sweat, as it was known, was first seen in England in 1485, but though it was almost certainly viral, it had different characteristics to the illnesses of 1558. Death within 24 hours was quite common with the sweat.There were even cases of people who had seemed quite healthy a few minutes before literally dropping dead.28 The 1558 sickness took longer to rob its victims of life. But it did so with impunity. Godliness was no deterrent to its onward path; so many priests died ‘that a great number of parishes were unserved and no curates to be gotten’. Nor was greatness any defence. Chief among the victims of that terrible year were Cardinal Pole and the queen herself.

  The first indication that something was seriously wrong came at the end of August. As the royal household prepared to remove from Hampton Court, where it had spent the summer, Jane Dormer fell ill. Her indisposition must have been unpleasant, since Mary ‘would not suffer her to go in the barge by water, but sent her by land in her own litter, and her physician to attend to her’.This kind treatment was typical of the way Mary looked after those who served her. Combined with Jane’s own youth, perhaps, it facilitated her recovery. Yet when Mary arrived at the palace of St James a few days later, there was an ominous development. She asked after Jane, ‘who met her at the stairfoot [and] told her that she was reasonably well. The queen answered “So am not I.” She retired to her apartments “and never came abroad again”.’29

  The queen was stricken by fevers, slowly sinking into greater and greater weakness. It was not a dramatic decline, but it was remorseless. As the weeks passed, she rallied occasionally, still taking an interest in government. Her recovery was not despaired of until around the end of October, when it became apparent to everyone, Mary included, that she was not going to survive.

  By then, she knew that one of the key figures in her life, Charles V, was gone. He had died peacefully on 21 September at his retreat in Extremadura, in the south-west of Spain. God granted him two tranquil years in the warmth of the sun: ‘No noise of his armies, with which he had often made the world tremble, had followed him to the monastery of Yuste; he had forgotten his steel-clad battalions and his floating banners as completely as if all the days of his life had been passed in that solitude.’30 The wars were truly in the past for him, and the brief period when he gave up public life does seem to have been a happy one. A mere month later, his sister Mary of Hungary was preparing, unwillingly but dutifully, to return to the Netherlands as regent when she, too, expired. Still with his army in Flanders, Philip received firm news of his father’s death only on 1 November. By that time, reports from London indicated that his wife did not have long to live. But there was never any question that he would be there to comfort her on her deathbed. As well as attending to the arrangements for the funerals of his father and aunt, he was pursuing a diplomatic solution to the war and coping with the refusal of Emanuel Philibert to continue as regent in the Netherlands. His hands were completely full. Reeling under the strain, he found an emotional outlet in writing frequent letters to his sister Juana:‘You may imagine what a state I am in,’ he told her.‘It seems to me that everything is being taken from me at once.’Yet he knew that he needed to keep England on his side. It would be important to ensure that Elizabeth succeeded to the throne smoothly and, he hoped, gratefully. So Feria was sent off once more to England, under instruction to manage the transition.

  He found part of his task already done.Though Mary was prostrated and often delirious, during her more lucid moments she had gone through a journey of self-realisation - of the acceptance of death but also the acknowledgement that she must face up to the responsibility of being a queen. She knew she must nominate her successor, for England’s sake. It was a difficult but courageous decision that Elizabeth herself evaded when her time came.

  The first stage of this process came at the end of October, when Mary made a codicil to her will. In it, she acknowledged that she was ‘presently sick and weak in body (and yet of whole and perfect remembrance, our Lord be thanked)’ but that ‘God hath hitherto sent me no fruit nor heir of my body’. She asked her ‘next heir and successor’ to honour her will, specifying her desire that the provisions she had made for religious houses and the establishment of a soldiers’ hospital be realised. But Mary recognised that Philip would have no further role to play in England after her death, though she asked him ‘for the ancient amity sake that hath always been between our most noble progenitors … to show himself as a father in his care, as a brother or member of the realm in his love and favour and as a most assured and undoubted friend in his power and strength to my said heir and successor’.31 But precisely who that successor was she could not quite yet bring herself to say.

  The codicil was signed on 28 October.Ten days later, probably as the result of pressure from Parliament via the council, the queen sent for William Cordell, the speaker of the House of Commons. We do not know what passed between them but Mary had finally accepted that her sister would succeed her. On 8 November, Sir Thomas Cornwallis, controller of the queen’s household, and the secretary to the privy council, John Boxall, arrived at Hatfield to tell Elizabeth that the queen had named her as the heir to the throne. Jane Dormer also claimed to have taken some of Mary’s jewels to the princess, together with a request that she would pay the queen’s debts and maintain the Catholic religion as the Marian Church had established it. The date of this visit is unknown, and there is no evidence that she either accompanied the two councillors or that she went with her future husband, Feria, when he arrived to see Elizabeth on 10 November. Jane was a very elderly lady when she recalled what had happened, but though her memory may have been faulty regarding details, there is no reason to suppose she made up the entire episode. She recalled that Elizabeth had assured her ‘that the earth might open and swallow her up alive’ if she were not a true Catholic.32 But to others, Elizabeth gave a subtly different message: ‘I promise this much, that I will not change it, provided only that it can be proved by the word of God, which shall be the only foundation and rule of my religion.’

  Was Mary making a gesture of last-minute conciliation in sending Jane Dormer to her sister? Perhaps her conscience told her that she should not die full of animosity towards Elizabeth. Despite her extreme state, Mary knew that her successor would do whatever she wanted. It was an appeal to a better nature that Mary never believed that the adult Elizabeth possessed.

  Feria viewed the entire situation in England as most alarming from Philip’s perspective. His master’s influence was gone, replaced by self-serving ingratitude among the councillors and a strongly independent outlook from the queen-in-waiting.The count was taken aback by how much Elizabeth’s attitude had changed since he last saw her in June. His meeting with her started well enough:‘During the meal we laughed and enjoyed ourselves a great deal,’ he wrote. Afterwards, Elizabeth invited him to speak more freely to her, saying that only two or three of her women who spoke nothing but English should remain. She began well enough, assuring Feria that she would maintain good relations with Philip:‘when she was in prison, your majesty had shown her favour and helped her to obtain her release. She felt that it was not dishonourable to admit that she had been a prisoner; on the contrary, it was those who had put her there who were dishonoured because she had never been guilty of having acted or said anything against the queen, nor would she ever confess otherwise.’ Her indignation struck Feria forcibly, as did her assertion that she owed her present position to the people of England, not to Philip or to the English nobility. He could see that ‘she was determined to be governed by no one’.There was a cold reaction to the news that Philip had ordered all his pensioners and servants in England to
serve her ‘should the need arise’. She would be the one to determine, she said, whether they should continue receiving money from Philip. Then she went on to complain bitterly that her sister had deprived her of the means of meeting her debts while sending large sums of money and jewels out of the country to her husband.This Feria parried. Elizabeth could investigate the matter, of course, but she would find out that Philip ‘had given much more to the queen than she ever gave to your majesty’.

  On the question of her marriage, she was equally forthright. She believed Philip was responsible for all the pressure put on her to marry the duke of Savoy and did not accept Feria’s explanation that this had been done to assure her place in the succession. Her comments were illuminating. She was sure that ‘the queen had lost the affection of the people of this realm because she had married a foreigner’.The assertion that Mary was no longer loved by the majority of ordinary folk cannot be substantiated, but it shows that Elizabeth was happy to damage her sister’s reputation before she was actually dead.

  The Spaniard was a troubled man when he left:‘She is a very vain and clever woman. She must have been thoroughly schooled in the manner in which her father conducted his affairs and I am much afraid that she will not be well-disposed in matters of religion.’33

  Mary was now beyond all these considerations. Drifting in and out of consciousness, she was surrounded by her anguished ladies, the only people who had truly loved her since she was a child. In their company, she always found support and diversion from the cares that beset her. They helped the queen meet death as devotedly as they served her in life. She seems to have felt no pain and her dreams, or visions, were of little children like bands of angels singing to her. Did their music take her back 40 years to that long-lost haven of parental affection, when she had run after the Venetian organist Dionysius Memo imploring him to play for her again? She knew nothing then of the vicissitudes of life, only harmony and security.

  At six o’clock on the morning of 17 November, before the slow dawn of a quiet autumn day, Queen Mary heard mass, as she had always done.Through tribulation and triumph, the familiar rites of the Catholic Church were her greatest comfort. She was still able to make the responses, her deep voice stronger than the muffled tears of her attendants. Then she rested. Some time around seven, as the light filtered into her bedchamber, Mary Tudor slipped away. So peaceful was her passing that those around her did not realise, at first, that she was gone.

  Mary’s coronation ring was taken to Elizabeth at Hatfield, as proof that the queen was, indeed, dead. Her successor, well prepared for the moment, gave thanks to God and began at once to govern, with all the confidence that Feria had observed in her a week before. Cardinal Pole survived his cousin by only 12 hours, his death probably hastened by overhearing an unguarded comment about Mary’s demise from one of his household. This gave the day a sad symmetry, but it removed someone whom the new queen disliked and feared.The task of Mary’s household officers and ladies was done, but there was no wholescale change in the complexion of politics. Eleven of Mary’s privy councillors continued to serve Elizabeth and the changeover of power was smooth.

  Philip learned of his wife’s loss with resignation. He told Juana:‘I felt a reasonable regret for her death. I shall miss her’. Mary had loved him unreservedly but would probably have expected little more from him than this restraint. Kings were not supposed to weep over the deaths of their wives and he was still a young man with only one heir. Politically and personally, he needed his freedom. But his time as king of England was at an end and he was anxious to start off on a good footing with Elizabeth, in minor as well as major matters. He ordered that a thorough inventory be made of the clothes and jewels Mary had given him, lest he be accused of purloining items that the new queen might feel were rightfully her property, not his: ‘In case you have to hand over this list and have it translated,’ he wrote,‘I am setting down here what I remember as to when and how the things were given to me.’The list included ‘a rich garter, with two large faceted diamonds, a large pearl, five flat diamonds set in a rose pattern, twelve flat rubies around the garter, set two by two, and twenty-four pearls set two by two’.34 The king noted that the earl of Arundel had invested him with this on board ship at Southampton. It had evidently meant something to him, after all.

  Mary’s body remained at St James’s Palace, lying in state in her privy chamber, until 13 December. Elizabeth certainly did not stint on the funeral arrangements, which were put in the hands of the marquess of Winchester. He was determined that the honours due to Mary should be fully observed and this involved a heavy financial outlay.The final bill for the ceremonies came to a staggering £7,763 (nearly £2 million today).When everything was ready, Mary’s coffin was draped in cloth of gold and removed from the palace, to begin its journey to Westminster Abbey. A life-sized effigy of the queen lay on top of the coffin, crowned and carrying the sceptre and orb, as Mary had done when she left her coronation five years earlier. A superb procession accompanied the queen on her last journey through London: her household servants and gentlemen mourners, King Philip’s servants, the marquess of Winchester with the banner of the English royal arms, and the heralds carrying the paraphernalia of monarchy - the sword, the helmet and the coat of armour - male symbols which would now pass from England’s first female ruler to its second. Mary’s ladies,‘riding all in black trailed to the ground’, and her chief mourner, Margaret Douglas, countess of Lennox, immediately followed the coffin. Behind them came the clergy.

  When the coffin reached Westminster Abbey it was ‘met by four bishops and the abbot, mitred in copes, censing the body; and so she lay all night under the hearse with watch.There were an hundred poor men in good black gowns, bearing long torches with hoods on their heads … and all about her guard bearing staff-torches in black coats. And all the way chandlers having torches to supply them that had their torches burnt out.’35 On 14 December requiem mass was heard for Queen Mary, presided over by Abbot Feckenham and his monks, following the ancient Catholic rites. The queen’s regalia, the symbols of her earthly power, were offered back to God and her body was buried in a vault in the north aisle of the chapel of HenryVII, her grandfather. Mary’s ministers and household staff then broke their wands of office and, as was customary, threw them into the grave with their mistress. Finally, the heralds made the long-awaited and unique ceremonial proclamation: ‘The Queen is dead; long live the Queen.’

  The funeral was superbly planned and carried out with great dignity, as Elizabeth and the marquess of Winchester intended. But if the new queen hoped that this careful orchestration of the handover of power would pass entirely without controversy, then she was to be disappointed. Bishop John White of Winchester gave a sermon that very nearly undermined Elizabeth’s efforts. True, his remarks about Mary were appropriate and heartfelt: ‘She was a king’s daughter, she was a king’s sister, she was a king’s wife; she was a queen, and by the same title a king also … What she suffered in each of these degrees before and since she came to the crown, I will not chronicle; only this I say, however it pleased God to will her patience to be exercised in this world, she had in all estates the fear of God in her heart.’ He had chosen as his text verses from Ecclesiastes: ‘I can commend the state of the dead above the state of the living; but happier than any of them both is he that was never born.’This gloomy and rather perverse sentiment was not itself the cause of controversy, but further into his oration White quoted from the book of Proverbs the very same words that Mary’s arch-enemy, the duke of Northumberland, had used in his last, desperate letter: ‘a living dog is better than a dead lion’. Having asked the question,‘What beast is more vile than a dog, more worthy than a lion?’White went on to expatiate on the notion that dogs were faithful, loving beasts and that King David had compared himself to one in the Old Testament. But in spite of his assertion that a proper understanding of these words was ‘better is one lively preacher in the church that dareth to bark against sin, blasphem
y, heresy; better is one lively officer or magistrate in the commonweal, that dareth to speak against injuries, extortions, seditions, rebellions and other discords, than the dead lion’, the damage was done.36 White appeared to be comparing Elizabeth to a dog and Mary to a lion. His words cost him his career. Elizabeth did not like the canine reference. She confined White to his house. In June 1559 he was deprived of his bishopric for continuing to oppose religious reform and in the following year he died.

  Bishop White was not the only one to run into difficulties with his eulogy to Mary.The writer of The Epitaph upon the death of our late virtuous Quene Marie deceased penned a glowing but very badly written poem to the late queen. In it, he remembered her gentleness, virtue, suffering and generosity:How many noble men restored and other states also

  Well showed her princely liberal heart, which gave both friend and foe.

  As princely was her birth, so princely was her life,

  Constant, courtise, modest and mild; a chaste and chosen wife.

  Oh mirror of all womanhood! Oh Queen of virtues pure! Oh constant Marie! filled with grace; no age can thee obscure.

  Elizabeth was furious that this panegyric made no mention of her, the new monarch, and insisted that this omission be rectified in an additional stanza:Marie now dead, Elizabeth lives, our just and lawful Queen