Mary Tudor: The First Queen

by Linda Porter

  In whom her sister’s virtues rare, abundantly are seen.

  Obey our Quene as we are bound, - pray God her to preserve

  And send her grace life long and fruit, and subjects truth to serve. 37

  In 1603, Elizabeth’s coffin was placed above Mary’s in the same vault. James I, wishing to honour his predecessor, erected a magnificent monument over the twin graves, though the only effigy is that of Elizabeth. The symbolism is powerful. In death, as in history, Elizabeth dominates her sister. Despite what was written in 1558, Mary was obscured both literally and metaphorically. But the plaque on the monument gives a different interpretation to one of the most sensitive and sad relationships in all of England’s past: ‘Partners both in throne and grave, here rest we, two sisters, Elizabeth and Mary, in the hope of the resurrection.’

  Epilogue

  Those who had been close to Mary continued to thread their way through the uncertainties of 16th-century Europe with varying degrees of success. Her household staff, in particular, found that their lives were greatly changed. There was nothing for them at Elizabeth’s court. But their experiences clearly illustrate that many prominent Catholics could not compromise their consciences, preferring exile to secret observance and persecution.

  Jane Dormer married Count Feria on 29 December 1558. He left England the following May, having cleared up as much of Philip’s business there as he could. Jane followed him to the Low Countries in July 1559. She never returned to the country of her birth, and when she and her husband established themselves in Spain, their home became the focus for the active but increasingly fractured Catholic opposition to Elizabeth in Europe. Feria was made a duke in 1567 but died only four years later. Jane lived on until 1612, by which time her only son had predeceased her. In her final years, she remembered with sorrow and abiding affection the queen she served half a century before.

  Susan Clarencius accompanied Jane Dormer and Lady Dormer, Jane’s grandmother, when they left England in 1559. It was to become a permanent exile, despite further grants of lands and wardships in Essex to Mrs Clarencius in October 1559. As Susan never received formal licence to live abroad, perhaps Elizabeth viewed the Essex grants as an inducement for her not to commit to the Ferias. If so, Catholicism and the shared past of Jane Dormer and Susan Clarencius evidently proved stronger than the new queen’s desire to show some generosity to her sister’s faithful servant. It seems probable that Susan was protected in her old age by Lord Robert Dudley, Elizabeth’s favourite, who was in touch with her up until the time she left and who was used as a channel by Feria himself when the count tried, fruitlessly, to obtain licences for Mrs Clarencius and old Lady Dormer to live abroad. In ensuring that she was not persecuted and her lands were not forfeit, Robert Dudley can be said to have requited the debt to his mother when she sought Susan’s help in 1553. Elizabeth did not grant the licence to stay in Spain, but Susan did not return. She seems to have died in the Ferias’ household around the spring of 1564.

  Sir Francis Englefield, having been asked to resign his Crown appointments, was given permission to travel abroad. He, too, left in the spring of 1559 and went to Flanders, on the understanding that he would return when summoned. But he became concerned that he would not be well treated if he returned and stayed away. Thus he became a wanderer, his lands in England confiscated (many went to Elizabeth’s favourite, the earl of Leicester) and his health affected by failing eyesight. During the 1570s and 1580s he was one of the most prominent Catholic exiles and his involvement in plots against Elizabeth eventually led to an act of attainder in 1593. Englefield died in Valladolid in 1596 and was buried in the chapel of the college of St Alban, the first English seminary in Castile.

  Edward Waldegrave and his wife Frances, who had been one of Mary’s ladies, refused to accept the Elizabethan religious settlement. In April 1561 they were indicted in Essex on charges of hearing mass and harbouring priests. Waldegrave died a prisoner in the Tower of London four months later. His wife remained committed to her faith and was interrogated by the authorities when two of her daughters tried to escape to Europe in 1565 so that they could get a Catholic education.

  Sir Henry Jerningham lost his offices as master-of-horse and privy councillor on Elizabeth’s accession. He retired to his house at Costessey in Norfolk, where he died in 1572 and was buried in the parish church. A kindly man, he left provisions in his will for almshouses and for prisoners in London. His family prospered over the years, despite their unswerving devotion to Catholicism.

  Sir Henry Bedingfeld, a close friend of Jerningham’s, was also excluded from government under Elizabeth. This was not revenge for his awkward period as her ‘jailer’ in 1554 but the inevitable outcome of his religion. He ran into trouble on several occasions for allowing Catholic worship at his home, Oxburgh Hall, and for refusing to sign a statement of loyalty after the northern rebellion against Elizabeth in 1569. His quiet but stubborn opposition continued until his death in 1583.The Bedingfeld family still live at Oxburgh Hall and have remained Catholic to this day.

  The politiques of Mary’s council fared rather better. Elizabeth confirmed the marquess of Winchester’s position as Lord Treasurer, but his continued attempts at reforming the exchequer by reviving ancient practices, which Mary had curtailed, led to a system of accounting so lacking in transparency that only death saved him from having to explain why his hand seemed to have been so often in the till. Some of this may be put down to the effects of extreme old age - Winchester was 98 when he died in 1572. Six years earlier Elizabeth had dismissed him from his post as speaker of the House of Lords, ‘considering the decay of his memory and hearing, griefs accompanying hoary hairs and old age’.1

  The earl of Arundel had a colourful if chequered career under Elizabeth. Though he was more than twenty years older than the queen, there were those who still believed that he hankered after the idea of marrying her himself soon after her accession. He certainly was vocal in his opposition to other men spoken of as potential suitors, Robert Dudley and William Pickering. Arundel continued as a privy councillor but left England for a year in 1566 to travel in Europe, where he was a troublesome guest. His involvement on the fringes of Catholic plots against Elizabeth in 1569 caused him to be placed under house arrest, but by 1573 he was back on the privy council, a gnarled political survivor. Illness and old age diminished his attendance over the rest of the 1570s and he died in early 1580.

  Pembroke, an admired soldier and servant of four monarchs, became close to the earl of Leicester in the 1560s. He maintained an active interest in business speculation, supporting overseas exploration and mining companies in England, but his association with the duke of Norfolk’s schemes to marry Mary Queen of Scots in the late 1560s nearly compromised the earl during the twilight of his life. Elizabeth believed his protestations of innocence and he still enjoyed her favour when he died in 1570.

  William, Lord Paget, was in chronic ill health by the time of Mary’s death. This and his close association with the Spanish marriage meant that he did not serve Elizabeth, despite having championed her quietly behind the scenes throughout her sister’s reign.Yet he could not break the habit of a lifetime of service to the Crown and continued to give advice to Elizabeth’s ministers. On 20 February 1559, he wrote a heartfelt letter to William Cecil and Thomas Parry, saying that while ‘lying like a beast here, [I] am not able to come to court without danger of my health; therefore I thought good, for declaration of my duty to her majesty, to put you in remembrance of things that you have known in our days’. He thought it was only a matter of time before the country became embroiled once more in the long-standing Habsburg-Valois rivalry. ‘If we take part with neither of them,’ he wrote, ‘they will fasten their feet both of them here, and make a Piedmont of us; if we take part with the one, we ourselves shall afterwards be made a prey by the victors. God save us from the sword, for we have been plagued of late by famine and pestilence.’ Doing nothing was not an option. He urged courage on Elizabeth:‘For
God’s sake, move that good queen to put her sword in her hand. She shall the better make her bargain with her doubtful friends and enemies … and move her majesty to use that goodly wit, that goodly knowledge and that great and special grace of understanding and judgement of things that God hath given her’. It was a handsome tribute from one of Mary’s key ministers to her successor and fully in keeping with the sense of duty he had brought to his dealings with Elizabeth’s father, brother and sister. ‘If I have been tedious to you,’ he finished, ‘in writing thus foolishly, I pray you make the best of it and think it is of a zeal to the queen’s majesty and to my country and to myself also.’2 He continued to dispense advice throughout the early years of Elizabeth’s rule, dying in 1563.

  Paget’s old rival, Simon Renard, never recovered the influence he had enjoyed as ambassador to England. His diplomatic career faltered when he fell out with his former mentor, the bishop of Arras, in 1559, amid accusations of betraying imperial secrets while he was ambassador in England. It was not the first suggestion that he was corrupt and this time, though the charges could not be proved, the taint would not go away. He retired to Madrid, far from his homeland in eastern France, and died there in 1573.

  Antoine de Noailles did not fare much better. He was appointed governor of Bordeaux and might have prospered had it not been for the wholly unexpected death of Henry II. The Guise brothers do not seem to have favoured him, and although he recovered some of his status after 1561, he did not have long to live, dying suddenly at Bordeaux in March 1563.

  Henry II had been overjoyed at the recovery of Calais and the marriage of his son Francis to Mary Queen of Scots. At last, he felt that France was truly in the ascendant. His determination to celebrate the peace signed with England and France in April 1559 led, alas for him, to his untimely death.While jousting on what is now the Place des Vosges in Paris on the first day of July, the king was fatally injured when his opponent’s lance pierced his visor. He survived for nine agonising days before succumbing. Behind him he left a legacy of weak boy kings, an increasingly dominant queen mother in Katherine de Medici and a country more riven by religious differences than England had ever been. For 30 years, France suffered the horrors of civil war, with great loss of life and bloody massacres that stunned Europe, such as that of St Bartholomew’s Eve in 1571, when at least three thousand people (ten times more than had suffered martyrdom in Mary’s reign) were murdered in Paris.

  Mary’s two most immediate relatives after Elizabeth were Frances Brandon, duchess of Suffolk, and Margaret Douglas, countess of Lennox. Frances, who had married her master-of-horse, Adrian Stokes, a year after the execution of her husband and eldest daughter, survived Mary only by a year. She was buried with Protestant rites in Westminster Abbey in December 1559. Frances’s two surviving daughters, Lady Katherine and Lady Mary Grey, both infuriated Elizabeth by making inappropriate marriages without her permission. Despite their lack of judgement, they avoided the fate of their sister, Lady Jane.

  The countess of Lennox lived on, relentless in support of the interests of her son, Lord Darnley. She was in and out of trouble with Elizabeth for supporting Catholicism in the early years of the reign but it was Darnley’s marriage to Mary Queen of Scots which sent Margaret back to the Tower, a place in which she was first incarcerated by her uncle, Henry VIII, nearly thirty years earlier. The young Scottish queen, an eminently desirable widow since the death of Francis II of France after barely 18 months on the throne, effectively called Elizabeth’s bluff in marrying this cousin and combining their claims to the English throne. But the marriage was a disaster and the countess of Lennox’s fortune appeared to have run out when the dissolute and increasingly power-hungry Darnley was murdered, possibly with his wife’s connivance, in 1567. For some time Margaret harboured thoughts of vengeance against Mary Stuart, but the two women were reconciled during Mary’s long exile in England. Margaret’s other son died two years before she did, but though this grieved her she was confident that her line would, one day, succeed Elizabeth. She died in 1578, leaving a grandson, James VI of Scotland and I of England, who united the two countries under his rule in 1603.

  Mary’s husband, Philip of Spain, gave the woman who had shared his European titles a solemn funeral in Brussels at the end November 1558. The chief mourner was Emanual Philibert of Savoy, and a riderless black horse with a crown on its saddle represented the departed queen. A requiem mass was celebrated by the bishop of Arras and mourning duly observed. Then Philip got on with the demands of government. His reign was an unremitting struggle. The trouble that his aunt, Mary of Hungary, had foreseen in the Low Countries culminated in the revolt of the Netherlands, a seminal event in 16th-century Europe, and the eventual loss of the 17 northern states, which became an independent country.The loss of these provinces, so important a part of his Habsburg heritage, was a bitter blow to Philip. His devotion to work was unstinting, but the sheer size of his domains in Europe and the New World overpowered him. He seemed more powerful than he was, though he himself was under no illusions: ‘I don’t think that human strength is capable of everything, least of all mine, which is very feeble,’ he wrote in 1578. Ten years later, after a long decline in the once strong Anglo-Spanish relationship, he was at the losing end of a war with Elizabeth. The Turks harried him, his Italian domains proved a poisoned chalice. Yet he never wanted war.The pleasure-loving prince became, over time, an austere and world-weary man.

  Philip was married twice more after Mary, first to Elisabeth of Valois, once intended as the bride of EdwardVI, and then, after her death, to his own niece, Anna of Austria. His son, Don Carlos, who became increasingly mentally unstable, mercifully died in 1568, and it was Philip’s only surviving son by Anna who succeeded him as Philip III. Before his death, the king had erected a memorial to his dead wives and dead children. Mary was not depicted, perhaps because she was childless, but her omission may indicate how bitter were his memories of Tudor England. He died in 1598 after a long and painful illness.

  Elizabeth, meanwhile, failed to honour any of the provisions of Mary’s will. She did not pay her sister’s debts, move the remains of Katherine of Aragon from Peterborough Cathedral to lie beside Mary, give money as directed for the universities or set up a hospital in London for old soldiers.This neglect was unfortunate but probably not inspired by deliberate malice.The new queen had other, more pressing, concerns. At the start of her rule, she faced many difficulties; this was the time of the ‘perils, many, great and imminent’ that Cecil nervously described. But some things went her way without too much difficulty. At home and abroad, she was helped by the impact of events at the end of Mary’s reign: peace was made with France five months after Elizabeth came to the throne, and she was able to re-establish herself as head of the Church in England when the Marian bishops, their numbers diminished by deaths in the epidemic, failed by a mere three votes to block her path. Their opposition was crucial to the development of the Anglican Church, since it forced Elizabeth down a more radical Protestant path than she had, perhaps, envisaged. Elizabeth cared much more about recovering the political power that Mary had rescinded than she did about doctrine. She had spent five years practising Catholicism, and although Mary always doubted her sincerity, it is unlikely that her observance left no mark on her at all.Yet though she shared Mary’s distaste for married priests, she did not legislate against them, and the persecution of Protestants stopped the day she ascended the throne. Mass was, once again, replaced by the communion service and worshippers received both the bread and the wine, as Cranmer had wanted. Catholics became, over time, a minority much discriminated against, with their own martyrs, though they did not suffer in the flames as Mary’s heretical subjects had done.

  Elizabeth never forgot or forgave her treatment during her sister’s reign and her rancour seems to have grown with the passing years. In her eyes, she was always entirely blameless. She could not see how the pattern of her behaviour must have looked to her sister. Elizabeth could always dance nim
bly around the truth and she continued to do so as queen. Unwilling to commit, ever watchful for an opportunity, she preferred to wait and see. In an ideal world, she would have wished, no doubt, to remain on good terms with Mary. There is no real sense, however, that she regretted the rift that opened up between them, except inasmuch as it made her own life as ‘second person’ more uncomfortable.

  Her reign was nine times longer than Mary’s and it is forever associated with a golden age in the popular mind. As a national identity began to emerge more strongly in England, Elizabeth was raised almost to the status of a national saint by centuries of male historians raised in the Protestant tradition. In this respect, her reputation is perfectly understandable. She was a remarkable woman presiding over a time of great achievement in many areas of human endeavour.

  Less easy to explain is why modern writers still persist in denigrating Mary. Elizabeth’s reputation is not diminished by acknowledging the interest or achievements of Mary’s reign, short though it was. Though Mary had not enjoyed good health since her mid-teens, there was no reason to suppose she would die five years after ascending the throne. Her Habsburg relatives lived into their mid-fifties and, had Mary survived the catastrophe of 1558, she might have looked forward to another ten years on the throne.3 This would have been quite long enough to establish the reformed Catholicism she - and, apparently, the silent majority of her subjects - favoured. Her relationship with Philip might have become more distant as he struggled with his wider responsibilities but her very childlessness could also have maintained English independence.

  The blackening of Mary’s name began in Elizabeth’s reign and gathered force at the end of the 17th century, when James II compounded the view that Catholic monarchs were a disaster for England. But it was really the enduring popularity of John Foxe which shaped the view of her that has persisted for 450 years. Attempts to soften her image have been made, but their tendency to depict her as a sad little woman who would have been better off as the Tudor equivalent of a housewife is almost as distasteful as the legend of Bloody Mary.To dismiss her life as nothing more than a personal tragedy is both patronising and mistaken.