She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (59 page)

The duke’s son, Robert Dudley, was already in the field with three hundred men, pursuing Mary into East Anglia; magistrates and county lieutenants had been warned by Privy Council letters to resist her attempts to ‘stir and provoke the common people of this realm to rebellion’; and six warships had moved out of the Thames to lie off the Suffolk coast, to preempt any attempt at escape by the princess or invasion by the Empire. But Mary’s unexpected resistance meant that more concerted action was needed. Men, horses and artillery were hastily mustered into an army that marched out of London on Friday 12 July under the command of the duke of Northumberland himself, England’s finest general, confident still that his soldiers and cannon, backed by the unanimous will of the council, would see off a challenge for which not a single one of the kingdom’s most powerful men had declared his support.

Six days later, as Northumberland approached at last within twenty-five miles of Framlingham, he learned with incredulous horror what lay ahead of him. Mary’s forces now counted ten thousand men and rising, more than three times the number of the duke’s troops. Still worse was the news of his warships. Contrary winds had forced them into the coast, where Mary’s agents had made contact and the crews had defected, putting ashore great guns that were now ranged in defence of her fortress at Framlingham. And when Northumberland retreated to Cambridge in shock at the overwhelming strength of his enemy’s position, it was to discover that in his absence his fellow councillors in London had collapsed into panic and recrimination.

Faced with news of the princess’s growing power in East Anglia, and increasing resistance too in the shires to the west of the capital, the great lords of the council had faced an unpalatable choice: risk everything by following Northumberland onto the battlefield, or attempt to save their skins by declaring for Mary. In the early morning of Wednesday 19 July their allegiance to Jane was still holding, overwrought and desperately brittle though it now clearly was. By midday, it had broken. A deputation was despatched to tell the emperor’s envoys that, although it had been reported that the whole council had endorsed King Edward’s plans for the succession, in fact ‘only three or four of them had given their willing assent and the rest had been compelled and treated almost as if they were prisoners …’ These mistreated unfortunates, now liberated from Northumberland’s baleful influence – a good story if they could make it stick – then gathered with the mayor and aldermen at Cheapside in the heart of the capital to proclaim Mary queen.

Jane’s proclamation had been greeted with silence. A lone voice daring to speak ‘certain words of Queen Mary, that she had the right title’, had been quickly suppressed, its wretched owner set in the pillory the next morning with his ears sliced off. But now the streets were packed with people brought running by the rumours that were racing through the city. The new proclamation began; and when they heard the name ‘Mary’, the crowd erupted, drowning
out everything that followed in a wild explosion of joy and overwhelming relief. ‘And there was
Te Deum Laudamus
’ – the great hymn of thanks for deliverance from danger – ‘with song and the organs playing and all the bells ringing …’ a Londoner named Henry Machyn noted in his diary, ‘and bonfires and tables in every street, and wine and beer and all, and every street full of bonfires.’ ‘Men ran hither and thither,’ an Italian eyewitness reported in amazement, ‘bonnets flew into the air, shouts rose higher than the stars, fires were lit on all sides, and all the bells were set to pealing, and from a distance the earth must have looked like Mount Etna.’ And while the celebrations raged, nervous messengers from the council rode through the night to Framlingham to offer their allegiance and their contrition to Queen Mary.

Just as Edward II and Hugh Despenser had discovered more than two centuries earlier, the imposing edifice of royal government could prove utterly, shockingly insubstantial if the authority it embodied lost its claim to legitimacy. And the issue of legitimacy on this delirious summer night was summed up in Henry Machyn’s description of its royal protagonists. Jane, he explained, was ‘daughter of the duke of Suffolk’, but Mary was ‘sister of the late king Edward VI and daughter unto the noble king Henry VIII’. The duke of Suffolk himself – as desperate now for his own salvation as he had once been for his daughter’s advancement – tore down the cloth of estate that signalled Jane’s regal status from above her chair where she sat at dinner in the Tower, saying (the imperial ambassadors were told) ‘that it was not for her to use it, for her position permitted her not to do so’. It was with gratitude that the girl who had reigned for just thirteen days – or nine since her public proclamation – relinquished a crown that she had always believed was Mary’s by right. When the news reached Cambridge, the duke of Northumberland stood in the market square and proclaimed Mary’s accession, throwing his hat in the air and, one of his companions later recalled, ‘so laughed that the tears ran down his cheeks for grief’.

Mary’s triumph was complete. On 3 August, at the head of an
imposingly magnificent cavalcade, she rode at last into her cheering capital, a small figure regally dressed in purple velvet and satin ‘all thick set with goldsmith’s work and great pearls’. Three weeks later great crowds again thronged the streets of the city, this time to watch Northumberland lose his head on Tower Hill. On the eve of his execution, the duke had renounced the Protestantism for which he had fought, apparently in a vain bid to prove his loyalty and save his life. (‘I pray God I, nor no friend of mine, die so,’ was Jane Grey’s shocked response.) Jane herself – ‘
cette pauvre
reine
’, as the French ambassador called her, ‘that poor queen’ – had returned with relief to her books and the muted clothes recommended by her own unbending faith. She remained in the Tower, condemned as a traitor for accepting the crown, but Mary saw her as a wronged innocent and, as the new imperial ambassador, Simon Renard, reported in frustration, ‘could not be induced to consent that she should die’.

Her enemies thus defeated, it was Mary Tudor who faced the reality – rather than simply, as Northumberland had planned for Jane, the rhetoric – of governing England as its queen. Jane had reigned, fleetingly and powerlessly, her crown acquired only by reluctant submission to the will of others. Mary, meanwhile, had stood alone to resist the plans of the greatest men in the realm. Now, she would rule. Her right to wear the crown as her father’s daughter and heir had been acclaimed with deep and genuine conviction after the trauma of that July fortnight. But in the exercise of her royal power, the challenges she faced had barely begun.

 

Unlike Matilda four hundred years earlier, the legitimacy of Mary’s cause had won overwhelming recognition, confronted as she was with a rival who had no advantage of sex or consecration to compete with her lineal right. Like Matilda, however – and Eleanor, Isabella and Margaret after her – Mary was faced with assumptions embedded deep within the political culture over which she now presided about the conditional nature of female authority and the limitations of female capabilities.

The queen was ‘of a sex which cannot becomingly take more than a moderate part’ in government and public business, the Venetian ambassador to England, Giovanni Michieli, remarked in passing to the doge and senate in 1557. Four years earlier, before he learned of the ‘device’ by which Northumberland’s regime planned to place Jane Grey on the throne, ‘the inferiority of the female sex’ had also occurred to Ambassador Scheyfve as one of the ‘other points which they may raise’ to discount Mary as her brother’s heir. Even once she had proved the emperor’s envoys profoundly wrong in their reading of the crisis and the potential of her leadership, Charles V himself had no doubt, when he wrote to proffer advice three days into her reign, of the constraints which her sex would impose on her rule.

Just as in 1141 when Matilda stood on the brink of power, the contradictions implicit in the prospect of a female monarch were precipitated into the open by Mary’s extraordinary and unfamiliar situation. No king could have tolerated the proposition that he should not ‘act on his own authority’. For Mary’s father Henry VIII just as much as Matilda’s father Henry I, that function – which was simultaneously a right and a responsibility – was the essence of his power. Just a century earlier, the intractable challenges with which Margaret of Anjou had wrestled on behalf of her inert husband had demonstrated how profoundly destructive a king who failed to act on his own authority could be. Yet Mary was being told that for her to do so as queen would be incompatible with being a ‘good Englishwoman’. Here, there are irresistible echoes of the chronicler’s outrage that Matilda should dare, with an ‘arrogant demeanour instead of the modest gait and bearing proper to the gentle sex’, to arrange ‘everything as she herself thought fit and according to her own arbitrary will’.

Mary’s situation, however, was significantly different from that of her forebear, and it made possible a significantly different response. Matilda’s victory over her rival had been partial and provisional; Mary’s was complete. Matilda had had to attempt to call her authority into being through the process of exercising it; Mary could bide her time before she revealed her hand. Mary, then, had no immediate need to challenge assumptions on the part of the emperor or her own subjects that she would need assistance in ‘matters that are not of ladies’ capacity’. She offered no resistance to the suggestion that her rule would require a husband’s help, and three days before her coronation, she made a remarkable appeal to the members of her council. Sinking to her knees before the astonished assembly, she spoke at length of the providential circumstances of her accession, the duties of kings and queens, and her determination to fulfil her responsibilities to the glory of God and the benefit of her people. Then she addressed her councillors directly. ‘She had entrusted her affairs and person, she said, to them, and wished to adjure them to do their duty as they were bound by their oaths …’ ‘Her councillors
were so deeply moved that not a single one refrained from tears,’ the imperial ambassadors reported. ‘No one knew how to answer, amazed as they all were by this humble and lowly discourse, so unlike anything ever heard before in England, and by the queen’s great goodness and integrity.’

It is hard to know, without access to Mary’s thoughts as well as her words, how much of this public performance was impelled by conviction and how much by strategy. Certainly, she was intelligent and highly educated, fluent in four languages and competent in a fifth, with a ‘facility and quickness of understanding’, the Venetian ambassador noted with generous condescension, ‘which comprehends whatever is intelligible to others, even to those who are not of her own sex – a marvellous gift for a woman’. At the same time, she was by temperament profoundly orthodox in ways that went further than her deeply felt faith, sustained as she had been through twenty years of uncertainty and suffering by her mother’s example of the female virtues of constancy, piety, duty and patience.

But whether or not Mary genuinely believed that, as a woman, she would require help in governing her kingdom, it was unarguably true, first, that she needed to find a way of managing a council composed of a dangerously unstable mix of her own loyal Catholic servants and those experienced Protestant politicians who had so narrowly extricated themselves from Jane Grey’s short-lived regime. As the emperor’s ambassadors shrewdly noted, the unaccustomed sight of their queen on her knees appealing for their assistance and their loyalty might well have encouraged some of her lords and ministers to conclude that she was acting out of ‘timidity and fear’; ‘but, however that may be’, they went on, ‘it has certainly softened several hearts and turned them away from thoughts of an evil and suspicious nature’. In the absence of a male rival embodying a more conventionally commanding model of kingship, Mary was discovering that female ‘frailties’ could on occasion be deployed to politically disarming effect.

The second inescapable truth was that the queen did require a husband – and quickly – if she were to give birth to an heir. As things
stood, by her father’s will and the act of parliament that had vindicated her own accession to the throne, her next heir was her half-sister Elizabeth. In Mary’s eyes, however, Elizabeth was illegitimate, born to Anne Boleyn before the death of Katherine of Aragon, Mary’s adored mother and Henry VIII’s rightful wife. Elizabeth was also a Protestant, whose current gestures towards Catholicism bore the unmistakable stamp of the princess’s political agility rather than any spiritual revelation. For the moment the queen was prepared to treat her sister with gracious magnanimity, but it was an intolerable prospect that her own death should deliver England into heresy and the crown to Anne Boleyn’s bastard. A husband, therefore, was a necessity, if not quite for the reasons the emperor had adduced, and, at thirty-seven, Mary had no time to lose.