Mary I

Mary I (1516–58), queen of England (1553–8). Few lives can have been sadder nor few reigns more disastrous than that of Mary Tudor, victim of the dynastic and religious tensions in her family. Her birth to Catherine of Aragon and Henry VIII after three miscarriages and a dead infant son was the occasion for great rejoicing and it was presumed that a brother would follow. He did not, and Catherine's only other daughter in 1518 was dead at birth. Though Henry was proud of Princess Mary, his marriage was breaking down and Catherine took refuge increasingly in her religion and her Spanish ladies-in-waiting. Mary seems to have been a lively little girl, ‘promising to become a handsome lady’, according to one observer in 1522. From birth she was a pawn in the diplomatic game and in 1518, at the age of 2, was betrothed to the dauphin of France. Before she was 3 she accosted the admiral of France at a reception: ‘are you the Dauphin? if you are, I wish to kiss you.’ But two years later there was a marriage treaty with the Emperor Charles V and by 1523 rumours that she was to marry James V of Scotland. By this time the shadow of a possible divorce was falling across her: Henry had a healthy son by a mistress, the five years Catherine was his senior were all too apparent, and remarriage was increasingly discussed.

The effect of the annulment of her parents' marriage in 1533 was shattering. All her sympathies were with her mother, whom she was allowed to see only rarely until her death in January 1536. Unless the plea was conceded that she had been conceived in bona fide parentum, Mary was illegitimate, losing any claim to the throne and precedence at court. In the hard dynastic world of 16th-cent. Europe, her matrimonial prospects plummeted. Worse followed. The execution of Anne Boleyn and her father's remarriage to Jane Seymour brought no respite, since the king continued to demand that she acknowledge that her mother's marriage had been invalid and recognize his own ecclesiastical supremacy. Desperate plans to flee to the continent and seek the protection of the emperor were mooted. But in June 1537, with the assistance of Thomas Cromwell, she submitted, was granted her own household again, and restored to precarious favour. The birth of a half-brother Edward in October 1537 appeared to remove any chance that she would ever be queen.

The remaining years of Henry's life were quieter for Mary and she was on good terms with his last wife, Catherine Parr. But her troubles had taken a heavy toll. She had lost much of her youthful vivacity, was often unwell, and in 1542 her life was said to be in danger. But she hunted, danced, was fond of dress, and enjoyed music, and the carousel of marriage plans never stopped. In 1541 her old governess of many years, Margaret, countess of Salisbury, went to the block, but in 1543 a statute restored Mary to the succession, after Prince Edward and any children Catherine Parr might have. From 1547 Edward VI's reign brought new trials. The king's two chief advisers, Somerset and Northumberland, promoted protestant doctrines and the young king grew up an eager reformer. When the Act of Uniformity of 1549 forbade the use of the mass, Mary continued to hear it and was warned. She replied that, in her conscience, ‘it is not worthy to have the name of law’. Charles V gave her powerful support and the overthrow of Protector Somerset afforded temporary relief, but Edward, as he grew older, appeared even more determined than his ministers to bring her to heel. In March 1551 he summoned her before the council, declared that he ‘could not bear it’, and was told in reply that ‘her soul was God's and her faith she would not change’. Her release from this stalemate came with the first signs of the illness that killed Edward on 6 July 1553.

Even then, Mary's succession was by no means certain. Edward had declared Lady Jane Grey his heir and on 9 July she was proclaimed queen. Mary had already fled to Kenninghall in East Anglia, where she had estates and much support, and on 10 July proclaimed herself queen. Northumberland's support collapsed within days and on 7 August Mary entered London to begin her reign. She was 37.

She had triumphed against all odds and it is not surprising that she attributed it to her steadfastness in her faith and to the help she had received from her co-religionists in Europe. She may have misjudged the widespread support she received at home for enthusiasm for the old religion, whereas it is more probable that it was recognition that, despite all the twists and turns of policy and fortune, she was Henry VIII's obvious heir, by birth and by his last will.

Mary had, as the imperial ambassador Renard pointed out, no experience of government at all. Until the spring of 1553 it did not look at all likely that she would ever be called to reign and, even then, the general assumption was that she would be guided by a husband. She turned at once to Renard for advice. The twin objectives of her reign were to restore the catholic faith and to negotiate a marriage which would hold out some hope that the succession would not pass to her half-sister the Princess Elizabeth. Roles were now reversed. In the dark days for catholics in the reign of Edward VI, Mary's known resistance was a beacon of hope: now Elizabeth played the same part for reformers in Mary's reign, though, characteristically, she played it with more finesse and pliancy.

Healing the breach with Rome was not simple. The mass could be celebrated and certain bishops were soon suspended—Cranmer, Hooper, Latimer, Ridley—while Gardiner and Bonner, who had spent most of the previous reign in prison, were restored to their sees of Winchester and London. But many of the ecclesiastical changes had been introduced by statute and would require a parliament to abrogate them. Mary's first Parliament in the autumn of 1553 made a beginning by declaring her mother's marriage legal and by repealing most of Edward VI's religious legislation. But the gentry and aristocracy showed little enthusiasm for disgorging the monastic estates they had acquired, even when urged to do so voluntarily.

In view of her age and the need for an heir, marriage had to be arranged at once. Mary had a sentimental regard for her cousin Reginald Pole, whom she cannot have seen since she was 15, but he was committed to his life in the church. The claims of Edward Courtenay flickered for a moment and died. A young catholic, he had spent fifteen years in the Tower, was released and created earl of Devon, but proved, on closer acquaintance, a sore disappointment. When the Emperor Charles V suggested his son Philip, who had just become a widower, Mary was attracted by the Spanish connection and agreed readily. Wyatt's rising against the Spanish marriage—part of a wider conspiracy which misfired—threatened for a moment, but Mary stood firm and it collapsed. Princess Elizabeth was sent to the Tower under suspicion of complicity, but no evidence against her could be found. Philip himself arrived in the summer of 1554. Though he behaved with courtesy, his Spanish courtiers were in private disparaging: ‘the queen is not at all beautiful,’ wrote one, ‘small and rather flabby than fat … a perfect saint and dresses badly.’ Another, more pointedly, observed that he did not envy Philip his duty: ‘to speak frankly it will take a great God to drink this cup.’ At first the marriage seemed to have fulfilled its main purpose. Later in 1554 Mary announced herself pregnant. In the summer of 1555 an ornate cradle was prepared and rockers appointed. But no child arrived and in August 1555 Philip left for urgent business in the Low Countries.

Meanwhile the work of reconciliation to Rome went on. It was a joyful day for Mary in November 1554 when Pole returned at last from the continent and pronounced absolution from the sin of schism, and in March 1556 he succeeded Cranmer as archbishop of Canterbury. The supreme headship of the church was revoked by Parliament in December 1554 and acknowledgement made of the authority of the pope, who had sent Pole ‘to call us home again into the right way from whence we have all this long while wandered’. Three statutes against heresy were revived. Mary's instincts at first had been for patience towards protestants and the overwhelming advice she received was not to drive too fast. But as opposition developed, her attitude stiffened. A first victim, John Rogers, a London preacher, went to the stake at Smithfield in February 1555, and was followed by John Hooper, former bishop, at Gloucester, and by Robert Ferrar, deposed bishop of St David's, at Carmarthen in March. Latimer, Ridley, Cranmer, and some 300 others followed. Moderate catholics were dismayed: ‘haste in religious matters’, wrote Renard to Philip, ‘ought to be avoided. Cruel punishments are not the best way.’ But Renard's influence was in decline. There has been much discussion of the responsibility for the burnings, and Gardiner, Bonner, Philip, Pole, and Mary have been named in turn. Of these Mary was probably the gentlest, but she bears the main responsibility since she alone could certainly have stopped them.

In 1554 one of the Spanish entourage wrote that Philip ‘fully realises that the marriage was concluded for no fleshly considerations but in order to … preserve the Low Countries’. Though the articles of marriage forbade England going to war to assist Spain, that was the intention, and in June 1557 Mary declared war on France. By an ironic twist, the emperor and Philip had quarrelled violently with the new pope, Paul IV. Mary found herself denounced by the pope as ‘the wife of a schismatic’, Cardinal Pole's legation was revoked, and he was summoned to Rome to answer charges of heresy. In January 1558 the French seized the initiative and besieged Calais. The great outpost of empire, English for more than 200 years, surrendered within a week.

There was little comfort in the short time remaining to Mary. Philip's second and last visit in 1557 had lasted a bare three months. But in January 1558 Philip was told by Mary that she was once more pregnant and the arrival of the child imminent. This time she deceived nobody but herself. On 30 March she made her will ‘thinking myself to be with child’ and conscious of the dangers of childbirth. That was no danger but there were others. Philip urged her to come to terms with her sister Elizabeth, an improving asset. Mary begged him to let the matter wait until he returned and not to be angry, ‘for I have already begun to taste your anger all too often, to my great sorrow’. By the summer she was obviously ill and more and more people were paying their respects to Elizabeth. In October Mary added a sad codicil to her will, ‘as I then thought myself to be with child’. She died on 17 November 1558, twelve hours before Cardinal Pole, telling her ladies that while she dozed fitfully she had seen ‘many little children like angels, playing before her’. Her husband wrote politely, ‘I felt a reasonable regret at her death’ and the first act of her sister's first Parliament was to reclaim the governorship of the church which Mary had so enthusiastically abandoned.

Among Mary's first words as a toddler had been ‘priest’ and she was buried, not in royal finery, but in the plain garb of a religious order. Her failure was total and she died with no earthly hope. Modern historians have pointed to the constructive achievements of her reign—reform of the currency, attention to the navy, reorganization of the customs. Mary herself would have counted them as nothing against the collapse of her grand design. Her reign had begun full of promise, with a spontaneous rising on her behalf and a joyous welcome. The loss of Calais might have been redeemed, though contemporaries were too close to see it, as later commentators did, as a blessing in disguise. But the burnings discredited the church she loved, sowed a harvest of hatred, and dogged the catholic cause for centuries to come. Mary did more than anyone else to make England a protestant nation.

J. A. Cannon

Bibliography

Loades, D. , Mary Tudor: A Life (Oxford, 1989);
Marshall, R. K. , Mary I (1993);
Ridley, J. , The Life and Times of Mary Tudor (1973);
Tittler, R. , The Reign of Mary I (1983).