She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (62 page)

By Easter 1555 England expected the arrival of its heir with anxious anticipation. The queen, slowed now by her growing girth, had withdrawn into confinement at Hampton Court, attended by her devoted ladies-in-waiting in warm rooms muffled with rich carpets and tapestries, where an exquisitely carved cradle stood ready beside her bed. On 30 April, when word reached London of the birth of a healthy prince, the city erupted in celebration. But it was rumour, running wilder than the bonfires in the streets, and it was quickly denied. May came and went, dates were recalculated. In early July, without fanfare or comment, the queen began receiving visits from male councillors and ambassadors once again, and by the end of the month little doubt remained that she was not, after all, pregnant. God’s blessing, it seemed, had been deferred.

Mary was by no means the only woman to have endured a phantom pregnancy. Twenty years earlier the wife of the governor of Calais, who also had a cradle waiting empty, was consolingly reminded that ‘your ladyship is not the first woman of honour that has overshot or mistaken your time and reckoning’. But the political consequences of the queen’s failure to produce a child, and the public humiliation to which she was exposed, were much greater than any other woman had to endure. Philip, who had waited in England to be by Mary’s side after the delivery that never was, sailed away from Greenwich on 29 August, waving his hat in salute to his wife until he was out of view. The Venetian ambassador gave the doge a fulsome account of the ‘flood of tears’ to which the queen gave way once she was alone; how he knew of this emotional collapse remained unexplained, especially since he later admitted that many months had passed since he had been granted the honour of a royal audience. Publicly, it was with a regal grandeur more unfathomable than ever that the queen returned to
the hours she spent at her duties and her devotions.

Philip eventually returned to his wife’s kingdom for a three-month visit in March 1557, and in January of the following year Mary announced the good news that she was seven months pregnant – ‘which has given me greater joy than I can express’, her husband wrote with formal courtesy, ‘as it is the one thing in the world I have most desired and which is of the greatest importance for the cause of religion and the welfare of our realm’. The queen had waited so long before speaking of her condition, she explained, to be sure that this time she was indeed carrying a baby. But no elaborate preparations were made for her confinement, and although she made a will at the end of March 1558 – ‘thinking myself to be with child’, and ‘foreseeing the great danger which by God’s ordinance remain to all women in their travail of children’ – she did not go into labour. By May the subject was no longer mentioned.

Despite all her hopes, her marriage had not emulated the success of the union of her grandparents Isabella and Ferdinand. Married at eighteen, Isabella had given birth to six children, while Mary, a bride at thirty-eight, had none. The Catholic monarchs of Aragon and Castile had united their realms to drive out the hea-then Moors, but in Mary’s kingdom the stench of burning Protestant flesh now served to deepen religious division. And England could look only with envy at the geographical strength achieved by the alliance of the Spanish kingdoms. By the summer of 1557, despite Mary’s attempts to act as a peacemaker, England had – as Wyatt and others had feared – been drawn into the Empire’s war with France. And in January 1558 the unthinkable news had come that Calais, the garrisoned port that had been the last English foothold on the continent for the past hundred years, had fallen to the French.

By the spring of that year, a queen alone at the age of forty-two, Mary was resigned to the absence of her husband and facing the certainty that she would not carry an heir. That prospect, Renard had warned after the debacle of her first pregnancy, meant ‘trouble on so great a scale that the pen can hardly set it down. Certain it
is that the order of succession has been so badly decided that the Lady Elizabeth comes next, and that means heresy again, and the true religion overthrown.’ The queen did not want Elizabeth to inherit her crown, but nor could she bring herself to dispose of her half-sister. Mary’s own favoured heir was her reliably Catholic cousin Margaret Douglas, the handsome daughter of Henry VIII’s elder sister Margaret by her stormy second marriage, to whom she had been close since girlhood. But it could hardly have escaped the queen’s attention that, by the precedent of her own victory over Jane Grey, Elizabeth’s claim would in turn be irresistible. Mary herself drew an absolute distinction between the legitimacy of her own birth and the bastardy of her sister, but she was enough her father’s daughter to know that the power of his bloodline was likely to prevail. All she could hope was that she would live long enough to prevent Elizabeth from uprooting the Catholicism she had so faithfully and forcefully replanted in her kingdom.

In that, too, she would be disappointed. During the summer of 1558, a lethal epidemic of influenza took hold of England. The new disease did not strike quickly, like the plague or the sweat. Instead, protracted, repeated fevers laid thousands low, and many did not rise again from their beds. That autumn, the queen was among them. In the first week of November, knowing by then that she was not expected to survive, she sent to acknowledge Elizabeth as her heir, asking only that her sister should fulfil the terms of her will and maintain ‘the old religion as the queen has restored it’. She held on for ten more days, drifting in and out of consciousness, consoled by visions, she told her closest friend among her ladies, of angelic children singing and playing around her. In the early morning of 17 November, mass was celebrated at her bedside before she finally slipped away.

Soon the road north from London to Hatfield, where Mary’s sister waited for news, was crowded with the great men of the realm hastening to offer their allegiance to England’s new queen.

 

‘She was a king’s daughter, she was a king’s sister, she was a king’s wife.’ Thus far, the bishop of Winchester’s oration at Mary Tudor’s funeral a month after her death is strikingly reminiscent of the epitaph of her forebear Matilda, who was lauded four hundred years earlier as the ‘daughter, wife and mother’ of kings. But Mary, unlike Matilda, was not ‘greatest in her offspring’. Instead, as the bishop went on, ‘she was a queen, and by the same title a king also’.

That somewhat ungainly formulation grasped at the heart of the challenge both women faced: to rule in their own right, when every assumption about the exercise of power took it for granted that the crown was shaped to fit a male head. Matilda tried to overcome that presupposition, and failed – not because female rule was expressly prohibited by law or custom in twelfth-century England, but because it proved impossible for her to secure a decisive hold on power when faced with a rival who embodied the conventionally comprehensible authority of male kingship. Mary, the daughter of another powerful King Henry, succeeded in asserting her right to her father’s crown, not least because her subjects did not have the option of a plausible male candidate for the throne. But Mary also faced many challenges that Matilda would have recognised as she sought to defend the independence of her own sovereignty, to rule as well as reign.

The explicit denunciation of women’s right to rule that was articulated at this point in the mid-1550s, most famously and heatedly by John Knox, was precipitated by the intersection between religious trauma and political circumstance. Knox, an anglicised Scotsman who had been a royal chaplain at Edward VI’s Protestant court, looked on in horror from his Genevan exile
as three royal Catholic women worked to hold back the tide of the reformed faith in which he believed so passionately. In the Netherlands, Charles V’s sister Mary, dowager queen of Hungary, served as regent on her imperial brother’s behalf. In Scotland, the dowager queen Marie de Guise governed Knox’s native land while her young daughter Mary, queen of Scots, prepared for her French wedding in Paris. Most egregious of all, Mary Tudor ruled England in her own right, and was setting about the utter destruction of her brother’s godly work in Knox’s adopted country.

The obvious answer was that this papist tyranny reflected the unholy and unnatural quality of women’s ‘monstrous regiment’, ‘which, among all enormities that this day do abound upon the face of the whole earth, is most detestable and damnable’. No woman should be allowed to abrogate the laws of God and nature by wielding power, and those who did – like Mary and her two namesakes, the dowager queens in Scotland and the Netherlands – were ‘cursed Jezebels’. Not even Mary Tudor’s worst enemy could seriously accuse her of sexual transgression, but the biblical Jezebel had imposed the idolatrous worship of Baal on God’s kingdom of Israel, and it was therefore the English queen’s spiritual ‘fornication and whoredom’ that made her ‘the uttermost of [God’] s plagues’.

But, however specific the context in which Knox was writing, it was the deeper resonance of his argument that allowed his trumpet to sound. Edward II’s queen Isabella, after all, had been named a Jezebel in England long before Christendom had split between Catholics and Protestants. And, as Eleanor of Aquitaine had been reminded when she rebelled against her husband, ‘man is the head of woman’, and she would therefore be ‘the cause of a general ruin’. It was notable, in fact, how limited were the attempts to refute Knox’s position. John Aylmer, an evangelical scholar who had been Jane Grey’s tutor, answered Knox in 1559 with
An Har
bour for Faithful and True Subjects Against the Late Blown Blast
Concerning the Government of Women
, but his reasoning differed from Knox’s only in extrapolation, rather than foundation. Yes, he agreed, women were ‘weak in nature, feeble in body, soft in
courage, unskilful in practice’, and they were subject, as wives, to their husbands; yet an exceptional woman might be appointed by God’s providence to the office of kingship, just as Deborah had been a lone female Judge in Old Testament Israel. In any case, Aylmer added, thanks to the role of parliament, government would be conducted not so much by the queen in person as by her male councillors and judges in her name, so ‘it is not in England so dangerous a matter to have a woman ruler as men take it to be’.

The occasion of this somewhat limp rebuttal was the accession of a new, Protestant queen in England, which necessitated a Protestant about-turn, executed with undignified haste, on the subject of female rule. Knox himself tried to make up for his own disastrous timing – his fulminations having been published little more than six months before Elizabeth inherited her sister’s crown – by writing to the new and clearly affronted queen to explain that he had not meant to include her authority, providentially ordained by God as it was, in his thundering condemnation of all women rulers. Typically, however, he adopted a tone of injured innocence (‘I cannot deny the writing of a book against the usurped authority and unjust regiment of women … but why that … your grace … should be offended at the author of such a work I can perceive no just occasion’), and could not resist the opportunity to offer the queen the benefit of his unsolicited advice (‘if thus in God’s presence you humble yourself, as in my heart I glorify God for that rest granted to his afflicted flock within England under you, a weak instrument, so will I with tongue and pen justify your authority and regiment as the Holy Ghost has justified the same in Deborah …’).

Elizabeth was not impressed. When Knox sought to return from Geneva to Scotland in 1559, she would not let him set foot on English soil, forcing him to brave the longer and more dangerous North Sea route to Leith. She was happy, however, to adopt the proffered mantle of a biblical Deborah – a providential exception to the common lot of women, depicted as a queen in parliament robes in a Fleet Street pageant at Elizabeth’s coronation – knowing as she did that the alternative was the familiar tag of Jezebel, which
would soon be enthusiastically redeployed against this Protestant queen by her Catholic enemies. This process of exceptionalism, of Deborah-fication, by which a woman who exercised authority in ways perceived by an approving observer to be desirable or legitimate could be excused, or raised above, the limitations of her sex, was familiar as well as useful. Mary Tudor’s bravery in 1553 had been an example, her supporters declared, ‘of Herculean rather than of womanly daring’, and four centuries earlier King Stephen’s wife Mathilde, ‘forgetting the weakness of her sex and a woman’s softness’, had borne herself ‘with the valour of a man’.

But the converse of this exceptionalism – the fate of a woman who exercised authority in ways perceived by a disapproving observer to be undesirable or illegitimate – was more pervasive and much more damaging, an infinitely regressive double-bind in which female rulers were all too easily trapped. Women were soft and weak, hence unfit to rule; but a woman who showed herself to be strong was not the equivalent of a man, but a monster, a crime against nature. This was the essence of the chroniclers’ vilification of Matilda who, with ‘every trace of a woman’s gentleness removed from her face’, conducted herself with ‘insufferable arrogance’ rather than the ‘modest gait and bearing proper to the gentle sex’. It offered ammunition against her descendant Isabella as an ‘iron virago’ who aped, rather than emulated, a man. It provided Shakespeare with his portrait of Margaret of Anjou as a ‘she-wolf’, a ‘tiger’s heart wrapp’d in a woman’s hide’: