The Two Tudor Queens Regnant : Judith Richards pinpoints the debts of Elizabeth I to her older half-sister.
The
Tudor monarchs, who ruled England from 1485 to 1603, have always attracted a
great deal of historical attention; the most studied of them all have been Henry
VIII (1509-1549) and Elizabeth I (1558-1603). The latter is still widely
regarded as England’s first iconic queen, reigning at a time when the
prevailing view was that females needed to be under the control of either their
fathers or husbands. In principle, sixteenth-century men were very suspicious of
powerful and independent women and told many stories of how women, uncontrolled
by a husband or father, became unruly, destructive and sexually promiscuous.
Elizabeth is traditionally seen as the woman who triumphed as a successful
female monarch in that male-dominated culture.
That
tradition, however, ignores completely how much Elizabeth owed to the queen who
immediately preceded her, her Catholic half-sister Mary (1553-58). Mary has a
strong claim to being the most reviled monarch in English history. Whether that
is justified or not, the point remains that Elizabeth’s path to the throne was
made much easier after Mary’s reign. Mary, being older at her accession,
better prepared for rule, and always widely recognised as a virtuous woman, was
a more acceptable character to her contemporaries to be first queen than her
much younger sister. This has not been commonly understood by later historians,
however, for ever since Mary I died in 1558, and her half-sister Elizabeth I
succeeded her, historians have focused on the many differences between them,
stressing the Catholicism and religious persecution of Mary’s regime, and the
Protestantism and (comparative) religious tolerance of Elizabeth’s. As one of
Elizabeth’s most influential biographers, J E Neale, summarised the
differences between them, Mary represented the ‘old world’ (by which he
meant one Catholic and medieval in outlook) while Elizabeth represented the
‘new’ England (Protestant and much more ‘modern’).
Yet
there are many ways in which it is instructive to compare the first two English
queens, and it is vital to understand just how much Elizabeth owed to Mary.
Rules
of Succession
Before
1553, there had been only one serious attempt by a woman to rule England as a
queen regnant, rather than be a queen consort (or wife to a reigning king).
Matilda (c.1102-67) was that woman, and her attempt to reign was marked by
almost continuous civil war between herself and her cousin, King Stephen.
Thereafter, although there were strong female claimants to other thrones across
Europe, few of them ever gained and retained their thrones. Male contenders
could usually muster stronger military support than the women were able to do.
There were, however, always a few who ruled their kingdom in their own right
even when, like the fifteenth-century Isabel of Castile, they were married. When
she died, Isabel was still independent enough to will her kingdom not to her
husband, but to her eldest daughter. But such very independent women were rare.
Four
centuries after Matilda, most Englishmen still believed that the English throne
was no place for a woman. Yet from 1553 to 1603 two English queens ruled the
kingdom, between them reigning for half a century. This happened because despite
his six marriages, when Henry VIII died in 1547, only one young male heir, and
his two daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, survived him. Mary was the child of
Henry’s first marriage to Katherine of Aragon, and was reared within the
Catholic Church. When Henry wanted to separate from Katherine, Pope Clement VII
repeatedly delayed granting him the annulment he needed. By early 1533, however,
Henry had secretly married Anne Boleyn and she was pregnant. While finalising
his first ‘divorce’, and making much use of parliamentary statutes to do so,
Henry excluded all papal authority from his kingdom, establishing instead an
independent Church of England with himself as supreme head of it. The process of
separating from the Church in Rome was completed by 1536.
Despite
the growing support for a wider reformation of the church in much of Europe,
Henry did not allow many significant changes to the religious teachings of his
church, but organisationally it was quite different. As a result of the new
religious regime, and although Mary had been brought up a Catholic, the much
younger Elizabeth was reared within the independent Church of England. Both,
however, appeared to be content with the church order Henry VIII had established
by the end of his reign. By his will, confirmed by parliamentary statute, Henry
had arranged that if his son, Edward VI, died without an heir, then his elder
daughter Mary would succeed him. If she had no heirs, then Elizabeth should take
the throne.
As
the next brief reign was ending, and to defend the more advanced Protestantism
established during his rule, the dying Edward VI (1549-1553) made a will
excluding both his sisters from the throne. Instead he nominated as his heir
Lady Jane Grey, granddaughter to Henry VIII’s younger sister and therefore
cousin to the Tudors. At first it seemed inevitable that the move to exclude
Mary (and thereafter Elizabeth) from the throne would succeed. Almost all
Edward’s leading advisers supported ‘Queen Jane’. She was married to a son
of the extremely powerful Duke of Northumberland, and she shared Edward’s
religious views. Even more importantly, Queen Jane’s supporters controlled all
aspects of the administration in London: they held the Tower of London and the
realm’s money supplies, the main military supplies and the navy. The
installation of Queen Jane also had the support of the French. In the face of
all that, even the powerful Emperor Charles V (nephew to Katherine of Aragon and
an ardent Catholic) felt he could do nothing to support his cousin Mary’s
claim to the throne against the Protestant Jane.
Nevertheless,
the older ways of deciding disputed accessions to the throne by force were
gradually giving way to a wider knowledge of the more peaceful force of statute
law. By that law Mary was indisputably the heir. It probably helped that,
outside more advanced Protestant circles, Mary herself, the daughter of
Henry’s first and most popular queen, was well known and popular, but many
Protestants also recognised her right to the throne. Faced with the proclamation
of ‘Queen Jane’, and despite having no visible support from any of the great
men of the realm, Mary proclaimed herself as the true queen. Unexpectedly large
numbers of men gathered in East Anglia to support her claim. As Mary reviewed
her assembling supporters, Londoners also began to make clear their disapproval
of Northumberland and of his daughter-in-law as monarch. Within ten days of Mary
making her stand, all attempts to enthrone Jane had collapsed. The initiative
for the challenge had come from Mary, and without her actions the Janeite coup
would almost certainly have succeeded.
So
Elizabeth’s first debt to Mary was that her elder sister ensured that the
crown continued along the legal line of succession, by which she was in line as
next heir. For several reasons, it is most unlikely that Elizabeth could have
made a comparable stand for herself in 1553. Although Edward was personally much
closer to Elizabeth than he was to Mary, he believed she was an equally
unsuitable heir. After all, her mother, Anne Boleyn, had been disliked by many
within and beyond the royal court, and had been scandalously executed on the
(admittedly highly improbable) charge of having committed adultery with several
men, including her own brother. On the ‘like mother like daughter’
principle, Elizabeth was seen as morally dubious – and that was before, at the
age of 15, rumours spread in and beyond England that she was pregnant to Thomas
Seymour. Such considerations provided good sixteenth-century reasons why Mary
was a much more acceptable candidate by law, descent and reputation than was
Elizabeth to replace the unfortunate Jane Grey.
Signifiers
of Monarchical Power
Once
on the throne, Mary found that the transition from male to female monarchy in
1553 produced some obvious and some unexpected problems. She was, however, well
placed to address them. Her mother had always believed Mary had the strongest
claim to the English throne, and her father seems to have shared this view at
least until the mid 1520s. As a consequence, Mary had been much better prepared
for such an office than ever Elizabeth, declared illegitimate before she was
four, could have been. Moreover, Mary’s mother Katherine was the youngest
daughter of Isabel of Castile and had grown up watching her mother exercising
all the powers of a monarch; she saw no insuperable barriers to her daughter
doing the same. But she was also aware that since the contemporary prescriptive
literature consistently taught the importance of very clear gender
differentiation between the expected roles of men and women, there were
inevitably going to be problems for England’s first queen regnant.
The
earliest problems which Mary faced were those of redefining the rituals by which
monarchs were confirmed in power, and precisely how that power was to be
exercised. This was a period when princely magnificence, publicly displayed, was
a crucial signifier of effective monarchy. A king on horseback, surrounded by
magnificent courtiers and displays of military might, was the familiar ideal of
a powerful ruler. Queens appeared more modestly, and seldom with displays of
military might. A king rode to his coronation on horseback in bright colours;
his queen consort, if he had one, travelled in a litter, dressed in white cloth
of gold and with her hair falling loosely down her back as an age-old symbol of
her fertility – fertility being the most desirable attribute of any queen
consort. The traditional form of English coronation ceremonies made it very
clear that queens had power only as their husbands’ partners.
Yet
with Mary, as yet unmarried, the rituals had to represent a monarch who was, as
contemporaries remarked, both king and queen. Mary’s coronation saw her
accepting all the regalia of a male monarch, even though she went to her
coronation dressed as a queen consort, with her hair down. By the time Elizabeth
followed the same practices at her coronation, she was described as being
crowned ‘according to the ancient precedents’, another indication of how
Mary paved the way for Elizabeth’s much less problematic accession.
Tudor
historians are now much more aware of the importance of magnificence in Tudor
royal theatres of power. But that was for kings. Surviving accounts – and
portraits – also stress the subordinate role and demure postures in which
royal wives were habitually portrayed, and so images of queens consort provided
a very limited model for representations of power for queens regnant. In this
sphere too, Mary had to work out how to take the lead role. By all accounts,
Mary’s clothing and her horse’s ‘furniture’, when she made her first
triumphant entry into London, set a standard of magnificence for a queen which
anybody – even Elizabeth – would always struggle to surpass. Like her
mother, Mary showed a talent for rich dressing; she appears to have taken it
much further than ever her mother did as part of a conscious policy of
empowering the female body, without assuming an immodest posture.
There
is an obvious contrast between the magnificent Holbein representations of Henry,
arms akimbo, literally and massively embodying majesty, and conventional
paintings of female subjects which involve a more restrained display of
splendour, with even a queen consort only marginally more splendid than leading
court ladies. Yet there are at least two 1554 portraits of Mary as queen regnant
by Hans Eworth which superbly illustrate the striking impact Mary achieved
through her jewel-encrusted sleeves and dresses, as well as the more orthodox
but unusually rich jewellery she wore around her neck and on her hands. On one
portrait of Mary in the National Portrait Gallery in London, there are at least
seven rings on her fingers. When the retiring Venetian ambassador wrote the
customary report on the country he was leaving, he made particular note that
Mary took particular pleasure in dressing herself elegantly and magnificently.
She also used her dress to make political statements, and to flatter visiting
ambassadors, for example dressing in French style when meeting the French
ambassador. Such political adaptations of foreign styles has commonly been seen
as an effective innovation of Elizabeth’s court, but again Mary set the
pattern.
Female
Monarchy
Mary
may have gone to her coronation dressed as a queen consort, but she proved
markedly assertive in her definition of female monarchy. To her, ‘monarchy’
was the crucial word, not ‘female’.
French
and English monarchs had long been famous for their claims to be able to heal
certain illnesses by a power called ‘the royal touch’. A much-favoured
French argument against female monarchy was that no woman could possibly
practise the royal healing touch because it was a function of uniquely masculine
sacred powers, derived from the coronation ceremony itself. Mary, who had
herself consecrated according to all the customary rites, practised the healing
touch for her subjects from the beginning of her reign; she also restored the
older practice of blessing cramp rings, to help ease cramping and arthritic
pains. As well as helping her subjects through them, she even sent such cramp
rings to, among others, the Emperor Charles V, the Queen Dowager of France and
the Duchess of Lorraine. In the face of explicit French polemics to the
contrary, and a great deal of implicit opposition from conventional beliefs
about the necessarily masculine nature of any priestly power, every time she
exercised her healing powers Mary demonstrated that female monarchy was as
sacred as male. This was another precedent Elizabeth was pleased to follow.
Indeed, later in Elizabeth’s reign, one of her defences against increased
Catholic attacks on the legitimacy of her regime was precisely the effectiveness
of her royal touch.
Parliamentary
statutes were also used to further clarify the status of a female monarch. For
reasons still not fully understood, a rumour spread that Queen Mary, unlike any
English king, had completely unlimited power, because all statutes aimed at
limiting royal power referred only to kings. Mary, shocked by this rumour, had a
law passed making it clear that a female ruler was identical in power and
authority with the past kings of the realm. That was probably a simple case of
removing a possible uncertainty. Another and much more startling definition of
her powers, however, also set out in statute form, was that such full power and
authority applied as much to a married as an unmarried queen regnant. This was
at a time when it was an axiomatic religious and social duty for women to obey
their husbands.
Matrimony
and Spinsterhood
Mary,
like later queens, apparently drew a distinction between her private duty to her
husband, and the obligations of her public office. When she married Philip of
Spain in 1554, this was confirmed by a marriage treaty which named Mary’s
husband as king and allowed his title precedence over hers, but which confined
his English role to that of assisting his wife, especially in military affairs.
In other matters, Philip was to be effectively political wife to the monarch of
England. Most coinage, charters, seals, and other representations to the two
monarchs showed Philip seated on his wife’s left (subordinate) side, just as
he was accommodated in what had always been the ‘queen’s’ quarters in
royal palaces. The treaty left little doubt who was actually monarch of England,
however the married couple might subsequently redefine their relationship.
Mary’s
insistence on the full equivalence of male and female monarchy necessarily
informed Elizabeth’s choices when she in turn ascended the throne. Mary’s
unpopular marriage to Philip of Spain provided Elizabeth with polemical
ammunition for many years, whenever she wished to resist yet another proposed
foreign match for herself. Anxieties that England would simply become an
instrument of Spanish policy after Mary’s marriage were not realised, but
helped Elizabeth resist marriage to any other foreign prince.
Even
more importantly, when there was an essentially Protestant uprising, led by
Thomas Wyatt, against Mary’s proposed marriage to Philip, there were strong
suspicions that Elizabeth had prior knowledge of the rebellion. The princess was
held in the Tower of London for some six weeks for questioning. Although there
is no evidence that Elizabeth’s life was ever in danger, Mary treated her in
such a way that (with a certain amount of judicious exaggeration) the younger
sister was thereafter cast – and able to cast herself – as yet another
suffering Marian Protestant martyr. This was so even before John Foxe’s
detailed descriptions of the sufferings of the Marian martyrs and his account of
Elizabeth’s own providential salvation. And so, for many of her subjects, the
rather scandalous princess of the Edwardian era was finally transformed into a
demure, pious, courageous Protestant, a much better model for the woman soon to
become England’s first Protestant queen.
Oratory
One
of the talents for which Elizabeth has been particularly praised was her
(ostensibly unwomanly) gift for public speaking. But before her, Mary had been
well schooled in the arts of exercising authority, including public speaking.
Again, it can be shown that Mary set Elizabeth a useful example. When fighting
for the throne Edward had bestowed on Lady Jane, Mary quickly gathered
supporters to make good her claim. A Spanish account has survived of her
rallying her troops at Framlingham in July 1553. It provides a powerful account
of her acting out the roles of a military leader, as she reviewed the soldiers
and made a stirring speech. Her later public speech to rally the Londoners at
Guildhall against the Wyatt uprising is a better-known example of the same
confidence and capacity. Mary was, by several accounts, a powerful and effective
public speaker well before Elizabeth demonstrated the same capacity.
Conclusion
There
was one final, and even more considerable, debt. From soon after her own
accession, Mary was ambivalent about Elizabeth succeeding her. She never forgot
that Elizabeth was Anne Boleyn’ daughter and so gave at least equal status to
Lady Margaret Douglas, Henry VIII’s niece by his elder sister. Nevertheless,
Mary finally overcame her many doubts about her half-sister and recognised
Elizabeth as her heir, probably because of her undisputed right in statute law.
She did so despite the considerable success Mary’s regime had achieved in
restoring Catholicism to England. Mary’s dying wish to Elizabeth was that she
should preserve the Catholic religion, but she must have known how very unlikely
that would be.
Whatever
the reasons for her doing so, by recognising Elizabeth’s claim, the first
queen regnant markedly reduced the chances of further civil war in England on
the accession of the second queen regnant. That provided one crucial thread of
stability in a very unstable time. But it was only one of the many debts which
Elizabeth owed to Mary.
The
elder sister had provided a series of precedents which helped model female
monarchy before Elizabeth’s rule. The politics of gender was, after all, the
site where both Mary and Elizabeth faced their most novel problems. In public
performance, public speaking, embodied female regality, and royal enactment of
conventionally gendered public roles, Mary set an example which prepared the way
for her sister’s much celebrated public performances. Perhaps it is time all
those precedents were taken more seriously in reassessing Elizabeth’s
achievements as second queen regnant of England.
Issues
to Debate
o In
what ways had Mary been prepared for her role as queen?
o What
model of a queen regnant did Mary bequeath to his sister?
o How
important for Elizabeth I was the work of her predecessor?
Further
Reading
Sheila
Cavanagh, ‘The Bad Seed: Princess Elizabeth and the Seymour Incident’ in
Julia M. Walker (ed), Dissing Elizabeth: Negative Representations of Gloriana
(Duke University Press, Durham, 1998)
Susan
Doran, Queen Elizabeth I (New York University Press, New York, 2003)
David
Loades, Mary Tudor, A Life (Blackwell, Oxford, 1989)
Judith
M Richards, ‘Mary Tudor: Renaissance queen of England’ in Carole Levin et al
(eds), ‘High and Mighty Queens’ of early modern England: Realities and
Representations (Palgrave, New York, 2003)
Judith
M Richards, ‘“To promote a woman to beare rule”: Talking of queens in
mid-Tudor England’, The Sixteenth Century Journal XXVIII (i) 1997.
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