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Mary Tudor 1st Edition Judith M. Richards Digital
Instant Download
Author(s): Judith M. Richards
ISBN(s): 9780415327206, 0415327202
Edition: 1
File Details: PDF, 13.97 MB
Year: 2008
Language: english
 ROUTIEDGE
HISTORICAL
BIOGRAPHIES

wu ‘itiestie
BLIC
Other titles in the series

Henry VII
Sean Cunningham
978-0-415-26620-8 (hbk)
978-0-415-26621-5 (pbk)

HENRY VII
SEAN GUNNINGEEAM

Henry VIII
Lucy Wooding
978-0-415-33996-4 (hbk)
978-0-415-33995-7 (pbk)

HENRY VIII
LUCY WOODING

For more information visit www.routledge.com

 MARY TUDOR

‘This highly readable book supplies an important reassessment of amuch

maligned figure in English history. In place of the narrow-minded bigot and
“hysterical” woman of familiar tradition, Judith Richards offers us a
rounded portrait of a poised Renaissance ruler, struggling — at times,
skilfully — to perform the daunting role of a ‘female king’ in a patriarchal
age.’
Peter Marshall, Warwick University

Mary Tudor is often written offas a hopeless, twisted queen who tried des-
perately to pull England back to the Catholic Church that was so dear to
her mother, and sent many to burn at the stake in the process. This timely
new study is a radical re-evaluation of the first ‘real’ English queen reg-
nant, in which Judith M. Richards challenges her reputation as ‘Bloody
Mary’ of popular historical infamy. Richards carefully locates Mary within
the wider cultural, religious and political context of her times, contending
that she was closer to the more innovative, humanist side of the Catholic
Church.
Richards argues persuasively that Mary, neither boring nor basically
bloody, was a much more hard-working, ‘hands-on’ and decisive queen
than is commonly recognized. Had she not died in her early forties and
failed to establish a Catholic succession, the course of history could have
been very different, England might have remained Catholic and Mary
herself might even have been treated more kindly by history.
This illustrated and accessible biography is essential reading for all
those with an interest in one of England’s most misrepresented
monarchs.

Judith M. Richards was previously senior lecturer in History at La Trobe

University, and is now a research associate. She has published a number
of studies of topics in early modern history, and has more recently focussed
on English and British monarchy from 1553-1642.
 ROUTLEDGE HISTORICAL BIOGRAPHIES

Series EDITOR: ROBERT PEARCE

Routledge Historical Biographies provide engaging, readable and academi-

cally credible biographies written from an explicitly historical perspective.
These concise and accessible accounts will bring important historical
figures to life for students and general readers alike.

In the same series:

Bismarck by Edgar Feuchtwanger

Emmeline Pankhurst by Paula Bartley
Gladstone by Michael Partridge
Henry VII by Sean Cunningham
Hitler by Martyn Housden
Lenin by Christopher Read
Louis XIV by Richard Wilkinson
Mao by Michael Lynch
Martin Luther by Michael Mullet
Martin Luther KingJr by Peter J. Ling
Mary Queen ofScots by Retha M. Warnicke
Mussolini by Peter Neville
Nehru by Ben Zachariah
Oliver Cromwell by Martyn Bennett
Trotsky by lan Thatcher

Forthcoming:

Edward IV by Hannes Kleineke

Henry VIII by Lucy Wooding
Neville Chamberlain by Nick Smart
MARY TUDOR

Judith M. Richards

Routledge |
Taylor & Francis Gro
LONDON AND NEW YORK
First published 2008
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2008 Judith M. Richards
Typeset in Garamond by Saxon Graphics Ltd, Derby
Printed and bound in Great Britain by T) International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Richards, Judith M., 1938-
Mary Tudor / Judith M. Richards.
p. cm. -- (Routledge historical biographies)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Mary I, Queen of England, 1516-1558. 2. Great Britain--History--Mary I,
1553-1558. 3. Queens--Great Britain--Biography. |. Title.
DA347.R46 2008
942.05'4’092--dc22
ISBN10; 0-415-32720-2 (hbk)
ISBN10; 0-415-32721-0 (pbk)
ISBN13: 978-0-415-32720-6 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978-0-415-32721-3 (pbk)
To the memory of E. M. K. M.
 CONTENTS

List OF PLATES AND FIGURES

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
A NOTE ON SPELLING
ABBREVIATIONS

Introduction: the reputation of Mary Tudor

1 Establishing the Tudor regime

The early years of Mary Tudor
The education of a princess: learning life and politics,
1525-1536
The restoration of Lady Mary, 1536-1547
Mary in the reign of Edward VI, 1547-1553
ff
uw
ao Edward and Mary: the final struggles 102

Establishing England’s first female monarch 121

Problems for a marrying queen regnant 142

The prosperous year of Philip and Mary, July 1554
to August 1555? 162

Religious trials and other tribulations 182

The road to war and the loss ofCalais 203

The end of the regime of Mary Tudor 223

Notes 243
FURTHER READING BY CHAPTER 253
INDEX 261
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 LIST OF PLATES AND FIGURES

PLATES (BETWEEN PAGES 110 AND 111)

1 Henry VIII, c.1535, attributed to Joos van Cleve

N Katherine of Aragon, attributed to Lucas Horenbout (or
Hornebolte)
3 Title-page to 1539 ‘Great Bible’
4 Mary Tudor, c. 1544, by Master John
b) Elizabeth Tudor, c. 1546
6 Edward VI when Prince of Wales, c. 1546, attributed to William
Scrots
7 Framlingham Castle
8 Mary | as queen regnant, 1553
9 Great Seal of England, 1554, showing Philip and Mary
oO Mary | exercising the royal touch

FIGURES

1 Tudor (and Lancastrian) Line

2 House ofYork descendants from Edward III (selectively)
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 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My thanks go first to my colleagues at La Trobe, who listened critically

and constructively to my early efforts to reassess Mary’s life and reign.
Above all, as ever, I must acknowledge Lotte Mulligan, to whom I am
indebted for support and encouragement over more years than I now
care to calculate.
As I moved beyond Australia with this study I met many new obli-
gations. Tom Freeman has saved me from many misrepresentations of
Mary’s nemesis, John Foxe, and he has generously shared information on
many other matters. Sue Doran, Bill Wizeman and Jeri McIntosh have
also helped and encouraged this study in many ways. My thanks go to
them and the others too numerous to list, whose comments at conferences
and seminars have spurred me on.
Above all, I must acknowledge the work of David Loades. His many
publications include a major study of Mary’s life, and the only detailed
examination of her reign as well as other works focussed on the 1500s.
My final assessment of Mary differs from his, but without the benefit of
his many works, this work would not have been written.
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 A NOTE ON SPELLING

Modern readers are trained to aspire to a consistency of spelling unthink-

able in the sixteenth century. Whatever the force of the argument that
early modern writers positively enjoyed creative variations in the spell-
ing of any given word, there is now a strong cultural barrier for any
reader to accept such variations. Hence, for example, the name Dudley —
an important name in mid-Tudor England, was variously spelt at the
time as Dodeley, Dodely, Dodlay, Dodle, Dodley, Dodly, Dodlye,
Doudley, Dowdlay, Dowdlaye, Dowdly, Dowdlye, Duddeley, Dudeye,
Dudlay, Dudlei, Dudleye and Dudly. There is no reason to believe that
list of possible spellings is exhaustive.
All spelling has been modernised to a consistent form, but the
language and word usage has been retained wherever possible.
 ABBREVIATIONS

APC: Acts of the Privy Council, ed. J. R. Dasent (London,

1890-1907).
Be British Library.
L&P: Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry
VIII, 1509-1547, ed. J. S Brewer, J. Gairdner and R. H.
Brodie (21 Vols, London, 1862).
CSPSp: Calendar of State Papers, Spanish, ed. W. B. Turnbull
(London, 1862, 1964).
CSPY: Calendar of State Papers, Venetian (London, 1864-98).
CSP.Edward: Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Edward VI 1547-1553,
ed. C. S. Knighton (London, 1992).
CSP.Mary: Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Mary I 1553-1558, ed.
C. S. Knighton (London, 1998).
TRE: Tudor Royal Proclamations, ed, Paul L. Hughes and James
F. Larkin, 3 Vols (New Haven, 1969) 1964-69.
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 INTRODUCTION:
THE REPUTATION OF
MARY TUDOR

THE PROBLEM WITH MARY TUDOR

When I first told friends — and some colleagues — that I was writing a
historical biography of Mary Tudor, many thought I was referring to
Marty Queen of Scots, a quite different and much more popular figure.
Those who knew better usually said ‘Oh! Bloody Mary! Why ever are
you doing that?’ Perhaps the most instructive reaction came from
another historian. When I told him I my topic was Mary Tudor, he
spluttered, ‘Not rehabilitating her I hope!’ I cannot judge whether this
work rehabilitates Mary in the way he feared, but I hope it explains why,
if she is known to people at all these days, she is usually seen as either
‘Bloody Mary’ or in this more ecumenical age, redefined as “Boring
Mary’, a new way of suggesting there is little deserving study in her
reign.
There are now a number of writers reassessing Mary’s reign. My hope
is that this new study of her life and reign might encourage that wider
reassessment of who she was and the grounds on which so many histori-
ans have been so critical of— if not openly hostile to — her. Perhaps it
might also encourage a better understanding of the range of problems
she faced. At least it seems unlikely that this work could do more harm
INTRODUCTION: THE REPUTATION OF MARY TUDOR

to her popular reputation. Her historical identity was shaped in the heat
of the sixteenth-century wars of religion, and has endured because she
fought on the losing side of those wars in England. As W. H. Auden
wrote, in ‘Spain 1937’:

History to the defeated

May say Alas but cannot help or pardon.

In this study Mary will be reconsidered not just as England’s first

crowned queen, but also as one who set many precedents as female
monarch which her sister was content to follow.

MARY TUDOR AS ‘LAWFUL QUEEN OF FAMOUS

MEMORY’?

Mary Tudor was the first English queen actually to reign unchallenged in
her own right. As queen regnant, her reign (1553-8) preceded that of her
much better known half-sister, Elizabeth (1558-1603). Despite being
the first English woman to be crowned as monarch, Mary’s reign has
received little historical study, and within the English historical tradition
the attention she has received has been overwhelmingly hostile. Her
Scottish cousin Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, habitually receives many
more references in books about sixteenth-century England than the
woman who ruled the country for five years. If they are pushed to identify
England's Queen Mary, the term by which most people finally recognise
her — ‘Bloody Mary’ — is the one invoked by Protestants, well after her
death, to reinforce inherited hostility to her reign and to her religion.
Given the novelty of female rule, a reader might reasonably have
expected that Mary’s rule would have been explored from many angles
to see just how she managed the transitions involved in the move from
male to female rule. Instead, until recently there has been little detailed
interest in her reign. Two of the more important exceptions are David
Loades and Jennifer Loach. There was also a very important — but too
little regarded — essay published by Elizabeth Russell in 1990. But in
the last few years that situation has begun to change and more studies of
Mary are being undertaken. Many still prefer to write about Mary’s half-
sister, Elizabeth I, almost as if she was the first queen to reign over
 INTRODUCTION: THE REPUTATION OF MARY TUDOR

England. Few have considered whether Elizabeth’s most enduring

advantage could be that she was the second female ruler, with a ready-
made model of how a queen reigned which she could reject or build on.
Not only was the very idea of a female ruler more familiar when Elizabeth
reigned, but she had the extra good fortune to live long enough for a
clearly defined public image to be fashioned about her.
A major theme of that Elizabethan propaganda celebrated her as the
great Protestant ruler who reversed her sister's Catholicism and stead-
fastly resisted every attempt to restore it. In doing so, Elizabeth was also
destroying the legacy of her predecessor, for Mary had worked hard (and
with considerable success) during her reign to restore Catholicism.
During the reign of Edward VI (1547-53), the younger brother of both
queens regnant, the teachings and practice of the Church of England had
moved closer to the teachings of more advanced continental reformers,
and well away from Henry VIII’s church. Mary followed, as the last
effective Catholic ruler of the kingdom, and it was inevitable that later
historians of the dominant Protestant tradition should decry her.
As a result, Mary was to be remembered not as the first queen, but as
the ruler who briefly restored ‘popery’ to England, one indication of the
extent to which she was really ‘Spanish’ in her sympathies. Her reputa-
tion, that is, was always embroiled in the changing fortunes of the
religious beliefs in England. In Mary’s time, the religious divide between
Catholics and Protestants was also caught up in the power politics of
competing European powers. The resulting struggle for religious truth
was one in which the Christian ‘faithful’ (of whatever persuasion) almost
universally accepted that stubborn heretics, resisting the ‘Truth’ being
set before them, should properly face death by burning. (The last here-
tic to be burned in England suffered his fate in 1612, some 5O years after
the death of Mary.) To most modern eyes —which do not see the differ-
ences within Christian teaching as matters of life and death — perhaps
the real surprise is that her appalling reputation as ‘Bloody Mary’ has
lasted quite so long, and is still in use in both popular and more scholarly
language.
The word ‘popery’, first used in the 1520s, was increasingly used by
the 1530s to represent everything nascent English Protestantism dis-
liked about the traditional Roman Catholic religion, and much more.
‘Popery was not just the name of a set of false theological dogmas; it was
the systematic usurpation of public and intellectual life by the priests.”
INTRODUCTION: THE REPUTATION OF MARY TUDOR

‘Popery’ remained a very powerful word, summarising and simplifying

all that English Protestants most disliked about the Catholic religion
until well into the nineteenth century. Since Mary Tudor had been the
ruler who devoted much of her energy during her five-year reign to
restoring papal authority to an officially Protestant England, she was for
several centuries treated as a case study in how appalling were both the
measures for, and the consequences of, the choices she made to suppress
Protestantism. The reign of Mary Tudor was quickly transformed into —
and long remained — a fearsome Protestant warning of the terrors of
Catholicism.
Above all, she was the ruler who burned heretics. So did many others,
and the circumstances were unusual, a matter to be discussed more fully
in Chapter 10. But almost all other aspects of her reign were usually
subsumed into that one issue, the persecution of Protestants and the res-
toration of a religion that most later English historians deplored.
Therefore, the most prominent feature of her Catholic reign is that some —
300 of her subjects — men and women — were burned at the stake as her-
etics. That was indeed an unusually large number of burnings but death
by burning was the traditional punishment for ‘stubborn’ heresy. It will
be argued that across western Europe large numbers of Christians were
burned by other Christians in the extensive wars of religion which
marked the sixteenth century. Moreover, many Protestants agreed
heretics should be burned — only the definition of heresy was contested.
Mary was, to some extent, written out of English history by the claim
that, although born an English princess, she was by inclination more
Spanish than English (with the strong implication that the Spanish were
by nature or religion much crueller than the English). The case is seen as
made stronger because not only did Mary have a Spanish mother,
Katherine of Aragon, but once on the throne, she chose to marry Philip
II of Spain. On such grounds as these, Mary I of England has for a long
time been a despised and deplored historical character, conventionally
identified as ‘Bloody’.

BLACKENING MARY’S REPUTATION

When Elizabeth came to the throne (in November 1558) her accession
proclamation was entirely conventional, announcing that she was now
 INTRODUCTION: THE REPUTATION OF MARY TUDOR

queen because of the death ‘to our great grief, {of} our dearest sister of
noble memory’. Just how formulaic was that expression of grief for ‘our
dearest sister’ became increasingly clear within weeks. In the following
January, during the traditional pre-coronation procession through the
streets of London, the closest the celebrations came to mentioning Mary
was with dark references to the great dangers Elizabeth had been in
when imprisoned in the Tower — where she had been held for some
weeks during her predecessor’s reign, under suspicion of plotting against
her sister's regime.
The last time Mary was referred to in the conventional terms of
‘lawful queen of famous memory’ was probably in 1570, and that was in
a papal bull by which Pope Pius V excommunicated Mary’s Protestant
half-sister Elizabeth I for being the ‘pretended queen of England and the
servant of crime’. He absolved all ‘nobles, subjects and people’ of her
realm from any oath of loyalty to her, and to reinforce that he threatened
excommunication to any who obeyed any command of Elizabeth.’
Unfortunately (from the Pope’s point of view) he had to recognise that
because those he wanted to excommunicate were fully in control of the
country, it was to impossible actually to make the bull formally known
throughout England. A few copies were circulated, and one appeared
nailed to the door of the residence of the Bishop of London. It is hardly
surprising that the Pope recalled the Catholic reign of Mary’s time with
considerable approval. The wider effect of the bull, as its existence
became known, was to confirm the general view of Protestants that papal
authority was a powerful threat to everything that the Protestant English
held dear.
The process by which Mary’s evil reputation has been modified has
been tortuous. In the centuries following her reign, there have always
been some Catholic apologists for her rule, but their accounts were usu-
ally no more analytic or detached from the author's religious affiliation
than were those of vehemently Protestant historians. One of the more
interesting works is that of Philip Hughes, who offers a careful analysis
of that most central issue in Marian historiography, who was burned,
and on what grounds. He offers some examples of those whom both
Protestants and Catholics agreed were indeed heretics, fully deserving
their fate.
From the Protestant polemicists, attacks on Mary’s reputation had
begun early. The Protestant exiles of her reign had frequently called her
INTRODUCTION: THE REPUTATION OF MARY TUDOR

a modern-day Jezebel, referring to the biblical Jezebel, who joined with

her husband Ahab in restoring false religion (1 Kings 16-21). Just five
years after Mary’s death, John Foxe, who became the pre-eminent and
enduring exponent of Protestant sufferings, defined Mary’s reign as the
‘horrible and bloudy time of Queene Mary’. Nevertheless, Foxe fre-
quently ascribed the Protestant suffering to the work of such Catholic
activists as Bishop Bonner of London — frequently referred to by Foxe as
‘Bloudy Bonner’ — and other ‘persecuting prelates’. He presented it as a
persecution pursued much more by ‘popish’ clergy than by the monarchy
itself.
There are places where he even showed some sympathy for Mary,
though never, of course, for the persecutions carried out in her name and
with her sanction. In the decades which followed, however, the distinc-
tion Foxe had implied between monarchy and clergy became blurred,
and the late queen became ‘Bloody Mary’, as a contrast to the great
advantages of being ruled by Protestant Elizabeth — whose religious vic-
tims were usually Catholic, and therefore more usually treated as
deserving their punishment. It may have helped protect Elizabeth’s rep-
utation that many of them, especially the missionary priests, were
hanged as seditious traitors for seeking to restore Catholicism rather
than burned as heretics.
The power of anti-Catholicism as a spur to political activity was
repeatedly demonstrated in seventeenth-century England. Foxe’s Actes
and Monumentes, familiarly known as his Book of Martyrs, was still so
widely read that it was second in popularity only to the Bible. Thus the
gruesome details of Foxe’s version of the Catholic persecutions — and the
quite as gruesome woodcuts — were kept alive and real for a significant
part of the population. The fear that a party around King Charles I was
plotting the reintroduction of ‘popish’ religion was a potent factor in the
English civil wars in the mid-seventeenth century, which culminated in
the public execution of King Charles in 1649. In his reign, to the hor-
rors of ‘popish’ persecutions was added the fear of absolute monarchy.
The nexus between Catholicism and absolute monarchy was confirmed
for seventeenth-century English Protestants by the rule of Louis XIV,
especially by his persecution of French Protestants after the revocation of
the Edict of Nantes in 1685. The original Edict had provided French
Protestants with some legal protection; its withdrawal was taken as
another demonstration of Catholic perfidy. So for English historians,
 INTRODUCTION: THE REPUTATION OF MARY TUDOR

Protestantism became increasingly identified with liberty, as (foreign)

Catholicism was with oppression and cruelty.
It is therefore hardly surprising that the histories written in those
years were effectively the continuation of the religious wars of the six-
teenth century by more peaceful means. In 1680, Bishop Gilbert Burnet
completed the second volume of his comprehensive History of the
Reformation of the Church of England. Foxe’s Actes and Monumentes was still
a major source for Burnet, as for other historians — and treated as uncrit-
ically as ever. He wrote that ‘the sourness of her temper’ made it the
easier for Mary to follow the principles of her bishops and their ‘severe
counsels’ in the treatment of heretics. And so, he concluded, at the end
of ‘her unhappy reign and unfortunate life’ as ‘queen of England by
inheritance and of Spain by marriage’, she died unmourned by any but
her ‘popish clergy’. In the eighteenth century, David Hume wrote of
Mary: ‘Obstinacy, bigotry, cruelty, malignity, revenge, tyranny; every
circumstance of her character took a tincture from her bad temper and
narrow understanding.’ She was, he concluded, ‘a weak bigoted woman,
under the government of priests’.’
By the nineteenth century, following the French Revolution, English
fear of French Catholic absolutism had been replaced by quite as great a
fear of French republican godlessness, but Mary’s public reputation
showed little sign of changing. One historian, Agnes Strickland, struck
a very different note in her popular multi-volume Lives of the Queens of
England, first published in 1840-9. She offered a more dispassionate
account of Mary’s reign, made possible because scholars like Maddern
(in 1831) and Tytler (in 1839) had begun to publish fresh selections of
historical sources for Mary’s reign. That was the first new material to
become available since the sixteenth century. Almost all of those docu-
ments, Strickland noted, ‘are in direct opposition to the popular ideas of
the character of our first queen-regnant, and dangerous, because the
desire of recording truth may be mistaken for a wish to extenuate cruelty
in religious and civil government’.
Despite the passage of the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1828, such
a concern to balance the surviving information against the inherited tra-
ditions remained unusual. Published in 1860, George Eliot’s account of
the rebellious young Maggie Tulliver records that ‘she knew little of
saints and martyrs, and had gathered ... that they were a temporary pro-
vision against the spread of Catholicism and had all died [by burning} at
INTRODUCTION: THE REPUTATION OF MARY TUDOR

Smithfield.’ Foxe’s work recording those Protestant martyrdoms was

republished many times in the nineteenth century, with detailed
accounts of yet more Protestant martyrdoms, but with the Marian
burnings a major feature.
Throughout the nineteenth century, Mary’s reign was still generally
treated as meriting little attention, except as an object lesson. The only
point commonly made about England’s first queen in English histories
was, as Lord Macauley exemplified in his History of England (published
1848-9), the many ‘cruelties’ of Mary’s ‘evil’ reign. For J. R. Green,
author of perhaps the best known of the later nineteenth-century general
histories — A Short History of the English People first published in 1874 —
the only significant theme in Mary’s reign was its part in the history of
Protestant persecution by Catholics. Early in her reign, ‘the Protestants
were at her feet, and she struck without mercy.’ By the end, her cruelties
and oppression were such that only the death of Mary ‘averted a general
revolt, and a burst of enthusiastic joy hailed the accession of Elizabeth’,
a judgement which would appear to owe more to Bishop Burnet’s work
than to the increasing range of new sources becoming available.
In the early twentieth century, the scholarly evaluation of Mary’s reign
became more complicated. One example of that is James Gairdner’s The
English Church in the Sixteenth Century from the Accession of Henry VIII to the
Death of Mary (London: Macmillan, 1902.) Writing within the Anglo-
Catholic tradition of the Church of England, Gairdner provided an
unusually sympathetic account of Mary’s regime. Indeed, his most pejo-
rative terms are. often reserved for the many reformers he viewed as
authority-defying troublemakers who taught a reliance on individual
judgement which led to ‘the violation of order and disrespect to all
authority’. He did not condone, but he sought to excuse, many of the per-
secutions of Mary’s days. But other historians remained much more
ambivalent. A. F. Pollard, for example, in his 1910 study, The History of
England, from the Accession of Edward VI to the Death of Elizabeth (1547—
1603) judged her as ‘the most honest of the Tudor rulers’ but he still also
saw her as ‘pitiless’ in a non-English way: “The Spanish strain in her blood
gave her religion its fierce unbending character, which unfitted her for
dealing with the delicate problem of the English reformation; and her
Spanish marriage cast her athwart England’s secular aspirations’ (p.174).
Until very recently, the traditional popular view of ‘Bloody Mary’ has
changed little. For decades the extraordinarily successful 1066 and All
 INTRODUCTION: THE REPUTATION OF MARY TUDOR

That (first published in 1930), that most popular parody of English his-
tory, reminded all those nostalgic for their old history lessons that
Edward VI had forced all his subjects to become Protestant ‘so that
Broody Mary would be able to put them to death afterwards for not
being Roman Catholic’.’ Carolly Erikson’s (very readable) biography
(1978) was simply titled Bloody Mary. The continuing resonance of the
original epithet for Mary is encapsulated in the title of a recent work:
Bosworth Field to Bloody Mary, published in 2003.° As this was being
written, a television ‘history’ series included Queen Mary among the
100 bloodiest tyrants in the world.
At the more academic level, however, interest in Mary’s reign has
broadened in focus from simply treating the burning of so many
Protestant heretics as just another demonstration of the dangers of
Catholicism. The work of Philip Hughes, already mentioned, is one
example. He made the conventional case that burning heretics was the
traditional response to them, but concludes that it was, in Mary’s time,
an inappropriate policy, given that the victims were being burned for
adhering to what they had been taught by their authorities for the past
two decades.
That now seems to be the accepted position, but Mary is still seldom
treated as a significant historical identity for other reasons. Until very
recently, serious historians have reiterated that her reign was, like her
body, sterile, achieving nothing —a boring queen? Most recently she has
been described by one Tudor historian as: ‘politically self-deceived. Her
piety and unmarried state gave her the intensity of anun.’ On the other
hand, there is wide agreement that when she did marry, she married
very unwisely, so both maidenhood and marriage were apparently part
of her problem. Another has noted that Mary ‘had received the best
humanist education’ but doubts that Mary had the intelligence and
astuteness to benefit from such education as ruler. Yet another has criti-
cised her for being a bad feminist since, by her marriage and the
restoration of papal authority Mary ‘announced herself as subject in both
her persons — as woman and as queen — to the authority of male
superiors.’
The grounds shift but Mary, it would seem, remains for most a regret-
table interlude in the history of England which is best passed over
quickly, but that may now be starting to change. David Loades’ two
studies, of Mary’s life and her reign, are valuable starting points, and
10 INTRODUCTION: THE REPUTATION OF MARY TUDOR

Jennifer Loach’s careful study of the parliaments of her reign is an

indispensable work. At the time of writing other works are also under
way.

SO WHY THIS BOOK ON MARY?

To this point, I have not been discussing the reign of Mary Tudor, but
rather other writers’ shifting understandings of her reign. For me, the
most interesting aspect is the extent to which, for centuries, almost all
historians of England settled for a repetition of previously stated views
rather than a reconsideration of them. Although many more documents
from the Tudor period have become available in the last 150 years, there
has been little fresh work on Mary until recent decades. This becomes
much clearer if a comparison is made with the many historical writings
about every other Tudor monatch.
There are, therefore, many questions still to be asked about Mary and
her regime. As first English queen, Mary faced many problems in estab-
lishing her authority over her most powerful male subjects. The office
which she inherited was profoundly masculine in expectations and
assumptions, and it was she who made the necessary adaptations in ritual
and government process, adaptations which Elizabeth frequently
followed. Mary was prepared to fight her own way to the throne — in the
face of an attempted usurpation in the name of Lady Jane Grey — and
provided leadership, apparently lacking in her some of male advisers,
against another attempted rebellion, six months after her accession, to
retain it. She survived the many French attempts to subvert her regime,
and as events proved, she managed her affairs so that England remained
an independent entity, with any Spanish influence vanishing with her
death. The marriage treaty she had sanctioned had provided for just
that. She died in her bed, as queen, and the throne passed peacefully to
her nominated successor. :
Until recently, Mary Tudor has seldom been celebrated for her
remarkable achievements as the first English female monarch. In the face
of many challenges she maintained her rule for the rest of her life, and
set many useful precedents for the much-celebrated Elizabeth to follow.
This was the more important because Elizabeth succeeded to the throne
at a much younger age. Moreover, unlike Mary, who was never the
 INTRODUCTION: THE REPUTATION OF MARY TUDOR 11

subject of such gossip, Elizabeth had notoriously acquired a more dubi-

ous reputation from the age of 15. It was well for her that Mary had set
so many precedents in how to be queen regnant — Elizabeth’s youth and
suspect reputation would have made her a much more contestable first
queen.
This book, then, sets out to re-assess conventional attitudes to Mary
Tudor, and to re-examine her reign as the first female monarch of
England. It will be argued that, contrary to the usual view, she ruled the
country with some success at a very difficult and divided time. It is for
the readers of this book to decide whether Mary deserved the reputation
she has borne through the ages or whether, when studied in the contexts
of her times — and of her predecessors — she deserves something rather
more sophisticated.
Perhaps, in this much more ecumenical age, it is time for there to be
at least some consideration of whether she might again be remembered
as Mary Tudor, a ‘lawful queen of famous memory’. What follows seeks
to set out the grounds for further such reconsideration.
 T
ESTABLISHING THE TUDOR
REGIME

Mary Tudor was born on 18 February 1516, the eldest surviving child of
the third generation of Tudors. She was born some 30 years after her
grandfather Henry Tudor had defeated Richard HI. By that victory,
Henry Tudor had transformed himself into King Henry VII and set a
new dynasty on the English throne, and when Henry VII died in 1509
his 17-year-old second son, Henry VIII, succeeded him. Such a peaceful
transition from father to effectively adult son was rare in recent English
history, and when it was followed by the peaceful accession of Henry
VIII's under-age son Edward VI in 1547, the Tudor dynasty might have
seemed securely established. But such confidence in the security of the
Tudor dynasty rests entirely on historical hindsight. Neither of the first
two Tudors ever felt entirely safe from the threat of alternative claim-
ants, and Henry VU, having fought his way to the throne, had to fend
off anumber of aspiring pretenders.
Because the Tudor dynasty was seen by many nobles as an upstart
family, it was important for both Tudor kings that they establish a strong
line of succession, with heirs and sufficient ‘spares’. At first Henry VII
seemed to have met that need; by 1499 he had three sons and two daugh-
ters who had survived infancy. But when he died in 1509, he had only one
surviving male heir, his second son Henry. The mortality rate for infants
and children was high in early modern England, with as many as one in
 ESTABLISHING THE TUDOR REGIME 13
four infants dying in the first year, and another one in four before the age
of ten. Moreover, statistically speaking, male children were more vulner-
able than female. In each generation of the nobility, up to 20 per cent of
all families produced no direct male heir. For the Tudor dynasty it was
always hard to negotiate the consequences of the prevailing infant and
childhood mortality rate, although the high rate of loss was not unusual.
After he became king, Henry VIII's marriage to Katherine of Aragon
in 1509 also seemed fertile enough, with Katherine experiencing numer-
ous pregnancies. But they included an uncertain number of miscarriages
and in the earliest years only one child survived his birth — but died just
weeks later. In 1516, the survival of Mary as a healthy baby was a possi-
ble sign of better things to come, only for no more live births to follow.
It was precisely the absence of any male children from that marriage
which gave rise to many of the trials of Mary’s life, but also provided her
with the unique challenge of becoming England’s first queen regnant.
This chapter sets out the defining contexts of Mary’s childhood, by out-
lining the problematic origins of the Tudor dynasty, and the reasons
both Henry VII and Henry VIII confronted so many threats within
England to their security as rulers. Those fears of possible rivals for their
English throne set the terms not only of Mary’s life but also that of many
of her closest associates.

THE FIRST TUDOR: HENRY TUDOR TO HENRY VII

A minimal requirement for a stable succession for any ruler was to have
a clearly recognised heir — and in England, successful heirs had always
been male. Englishmen knew that elsewhere there had been — and were
— female rulers, but in England only one woman had ever been recog-
nised as a legitimate heir. That was Maud (commonly known by the
Latin form of her name, Matilda), daughter to Henry I. As one son of
William the Conqueror, Henry had become king of England in 1100. In
1120 his only legitimate son, William, was lost at sea, along with many
of England’s next generation of leaders. (The wreck of William’s ship,
the White Ship, and William’s fatal attempt to rescue his drowning half-
sister, became a popular subject of medieval tales.) By 1127 Henry I
believed he had solved his inheritance problem by having all his nobles
swear allegiance to his surviving legitimate child, Matilda. They did so,
ESTABLISHING THE TUDOR REGIME

but after Henry’s death, many supported her cousin Stephen instead.
The ensuing civil wars ended with an agreement that after Stephen’s
death, Matilda’s son would succeed him in England. That son was Henry
II, the first Plantagenet ruler, who reigned from 1154. Thereafter, it was
recognised that the crown could be transmitted through the female line
—and was on other occasions — but it was never actually held by a female
heir before 1553, when Mary succeeded to it.
Until 1485 and the death of Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth,
different branches of the Plantagenet family had ruled England ever
since Henry II. By the mid-fifteenth century, any semblance of family
unity had disappeared through increasingly intense competition between
two branches — the house of Lancaster (descendants of John of Gaunt,
Duke of Lancaster) and the more recently emerged House of York. To
compound the problems of inheritance, over time some Plantagenet
kings — most notably Edward III — had been remarkably fruitful both
within and beyond their marriages. Edward III left five legitimate sons,
five legitimate daughters and an uncertain number of illegitimate off-
spring. One of his legitimate sons, John of Gaunt, himself fathered three
families, the third one illegitimate. It is hardly surprising that, with
such a prolific lineage, over the generations royal and noble blood had
become deeply meshed by intermarriage. Several of the greatest land-
holders could trace multiple lines of descent back to offspring of previous
kings of England and/or their close relatives. Edward IV (died 1483),
himself with three mature brothers and three sisters, also had eight chil-
dren who lived long enough to be of some historical significance. Six
were daughters, and several of them produced even more possible claim-
ants to the Tudor throne. In brief, England’s nobility included a
considerable number who could make plausible lineal claims to the
throne should the opportunity arise. The first two generations of Tudors,
therefore, had good reason to be anxious that descendants of the older
royal family would reassert their claims against them — as, indeed,
various claimants did.

THE ORIGINS OF THE TUDORS

Unlike the Plantagenets, the house of Tudor had emerged very recently
indeed, and out of almost nowhere. King Henry VII (1485-1509) was
 ESTABLISHING THE TUDOR REGIME

born Henry Tudor, a descendent of Katherine of Valois, the widow of

Henry V and mother of Henry VI. Some ten years after she was widowed
when only 21, Katherine had secretly married a Welsh member of her
household, Owen Tudor. His family had played an important role in the
Glyndwr rebellions against Henry IV, but it was a family in decline
until Owen went into royal service. Little is known of Owen Tudor
before his marriage to the Dowager Queen of England. Katherine’s
second family (of which three sons survived to maturity) was kept secret
even from her royal son until just before she died, but Henry VI appar-
ently accepted his half-brothers gracefully enough, and promoted their
interests. Owen Tudor himself died serving the family he had married
into, being captured and executed while fighting for the Lancastrian
cause in Wales in 1461.' One son, Edmund Tudor, married Margaret
Beaufort, then England’s richest heiress. She was a descendant of John of
Gaunt through the illegitimate family he fathered with Catherine
Swynford. Since these children were all born before their parents mar-
ried (in 1396), that illegitimate family formed a new line, named
Beaufort after one of Gaunt’s castles.
When it was finally legitimated, the Beaufort line was explicitly
debarred from making any claim to the throne. Henry Tudor, the only
son of the Edmund Tudor—Margaret Beaufort marriage, was born after
his father’s death. He was indisputably of French royal descent through
his father’s line, but his mother’s illegitimate lineage was the only
ground Henry Tudor had for a claim to the throne of England. Against
his legal exclusion from the throne, Henry could trace his unbroken
descent back to John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. When the senior line
of Lancastrians (Henrys IV, V and VI) failed after the death of Henry VI
in the Tower in 1471, the young Henry Tudor therefore had as good a
claim as any to lead any Lancastrian resistance to the reign of Edward IV.
As a result, although initially on good terms with the Yorkist Edward,
king from 1470, Henry Tudor soon found it wiser to retire from the
realm and go abroad for his own safety.
Supported by his surviving uncle Jasper Tudor abroad, and schemed
for in England by his mother, Henry’s best chance to succeed to the
throne followed the death of Edward IV in 1483. The dying Edward had
named his brother, Richard Duke of Gloucester, as protector of his
young son, Edward V, until the boy should be old enough to rule. But
within months, Richard had both the late king’s sons (Edward and
ESTABLISHING THE TUDOR REGIME

Richard) declared illegitimate and assumed the throne himself as

Richard III. He faced some opposition from the start of his reign, but
the opposition intensified after the two boys disappeared into the Tower
of London, and rumours began to circulate that they had been
murdered.*
Henry Stafford, the second Duke of Buckingham, owner of vast lands
and with much Plantagenet blood in his veins, was one important noble
who, at first a strong supporter of Richard, later turned against him.
Many others urged Buckingham onto rebellion, including Margaret
Beaufort. Her reasons for supporting his rising are not clear, but it is
quite possible that she was urging him on to his destruction to help clear
the way to the throne for her own son, since Buckingham was in a strong
position to claim the crown himself. For whatever reasons, he finally
declared against Richard III in late 1483. That rebellion was quickly
crushed, and the duke was ignominiously executed in a market square.
Henry Tudor had arrived in England from Brittany, but too late to sup-
port Buckingham and rapidly departed again to exile, having achieved
nothing except, perhaps, the loss of a major rival. But despite King
Richard’s victory over Buckingham, his fortunes did not improve, and
Henry Tudor returned again to England, for his second attempt to over-
throw the king. He landed in Wales, but received little support there,
despite the Welsh component of his Tudor descent. On 22 August 1485
he met up with Richard’s much greater forces at Bosworth, near Leicester,
and won the day, probably because of last-minute defections from
Richard’s army.
It was a brutal battle, even by the standards of that time. Richard III
was probably hacked to death in the marshes by a group of unknown
Welshmen, and few details of the battle were ever recorded. There sur-

* Who was actually responsible for the deaths of the two princes in the Tower,
let alone when they actually died, is still a subject of much historical speculation
— and is likely to remain so. Possible candidates have included Richard III,
Henry VII, the Duke of Buckingham, and others possibly acting on behalf of
some unnamed third party. The only thing universally agreed is that it is most
unlikely they died from natural causes. Whatever the truth of their disappear-
ance, the mystery would make it much easier for impostors claiming to be either
of the two — but more commonly the younger one, Richard — to be put forward
as figureheads by opponents to the Tudor regime!
 ESTABLISHING THE TUDOR REGIME 7,
vived, however, rumours of sinister behaviour, of treachery among King
Richard’s greatest followers; the behaviour of, for example, Richard’s
trusted supporter and Henry Tudor’s step-father Lord Thomas Stanley
was at best ambiguous. There was very little said about a significant
number of French troops and even a Scots contingent helping Henry
Tudor to the English throne. For whatever reason, there was no coherent
English account of what happened at Bosworth until much later,
although several foreign accounts survive.
During the previous decades, defeated monarchs (and contenders for
the throne) had been known to die in mysterious circumstances. It was,
however, unprecedented for the battered, naked body of an anointed
king to be left lying in a tavern trough in Leicester for three days. That
was the fate of Richard HI, but even Shakespeare, in his reworking of
nearly a century of Tudor vilification of Richard III, made no reference
to the shameful treatment of the corpse of the last Plantagenet king.
Curiously, some ten years after his victory at Bosworth, Henry VII was
moved finally to arrange for a proper burial and tomb for Richard IH; by
that time he presumably felt sufficiently secure to allow himself a little
courtesy to his wife’s uncle. It may also have been a gesture to placate
ongoing Yorkist resistance to his reign.

THE REIGN OF HENRY VII

Although Henry VII decisively defeated the forces of Richard II, the
founder of the Tudor dynasty spent much of his reign shoring up the
throne he had seized. His claims to the crown were never persuasively
defined. The 1485 parliamentary act confirming his rule declared that
he was king:

To the pleasure of Almighty God, the wealth, prosperity and surety of this
realm of England, to the singular comfort of all the king’s subjects of the
same, and [for the] avoiding ofall ambiguities and questions.

That was an argument from convenience rather than any declaration of

right. The same parliamentary act confirming him as king was also
explicit that the crown lawfully lay ‘in the most royal person of our now
sovereign ... and in none other’.’
18 ESTABLISHING THE TUDOR REGIME

That last phrase is significant since, well before his successful inva-
sion of England, Henry had won more support by agreeing to marry
Edward IV’s eldest daughter and surviving heir, but he was to do so only
belatedly. He was adamant that his betrothal and later marriage to the
heir to the House of York was never part of his claim to the throne.
Indeed, the endorsement by Pope Innocent VIII of Henry VII's right to
reign, widely disseminated through England, forcefully reiterated the
Tudor case that Henry was the sole legitimate royal heir, and repeated
the king’s own argument that he was on the throne by ‘his undoubted
title of succession, as by the right of his most noble victory, and by elec-
tion of the lords spiritual and temporal’ as well as by the parliamentary
statute quoted above.’ It is intriguing to note how willing Henry VII
was to shore up his regal claim by drawing upon that same papal power
to make and unmake kings which his son, Henry VIII, was so vehemently
to repudiate in the 1530s.
We cannot now know how many of his subjects were persuaded by
Henry VII's claims, but there is evidence that a significant number were
not. The previous three kings — Edward IV, Edward V and Richard III —
had all belonged to the house of York. Henry VII, with his tenuous
claim to a Lancastrian inheritance, faced resistance to his reign from
some of the old Plantagenet blood in general and from Yorkists in
particular for the rest of his life, despite his marriage to Elizabeth of
York. Henry had married her only after his own coronation, as yet
another sign of his denial that he owed his throne in any way to his mar-
riage with her. It was only after Elizabeth of York had presented him
with a son and heir, that Henry gave her a magnificent coronation. Then
she received the full four days of coronation ceremonial, including a pro-
cession the day before the coronation, resplendent with white roses, the
symbol of her house of York. Henry, however, never allowed her any
degree of political power, but she was always a popular figure. One
foreign ambassador even remarked that she was so beloved because she
had no power.
Whatever the reason for Henry’s attitude to his wife, he always
showed the greatest respect for his mother, the formidable Margaret
Beaufort. Throughout his reign, she remained his most consistently
close associate and co-worker. With her he travelled round the kingdom
for months on end, reviewing the good order of the realm and erecting
monuments to emphasise the regality of their family line. Although she
 ESTABLISHING THE TUDOR REGIME 9
never mistook her role for that of a counsellor, she was unusually impor-
tant to him, and entrusted with judicial authority unprecedented for a
woman. Chosen for that role because of her large landholdings in any
area where the king had few other reliable allies, she was the first woman
known to have presided over a regional court.
Although there are no other known examples of a woman wielding
quite that authority at that time, it is a noteworthy example of just how
much authority women, when they did have the appropriate resources
and status, could wield. Son and mother were constantly in close com-
munication. It was Lady Margaret, moreover, who took over supervision
of that important aspect of Tudor display, the planning of public cere-
monials. Together mother and son ensured that the Tudor court rivalled
and even surpassed the Yorkist courts in its splendour. Decades later,
Mary Tudor was given some very striking descriptions of the household
and estate maintained by her formidable great-grandmother, and the
authority she wielded over all the men about her. It was a helpful
precedent.
Henry VII is often presented as a rather parsimonious king, but he
spent lavishly enough to ensure that his palaces, and other indicators of
his regal estate impressed his subjects. As Sir John Fortescue (¢c.1394—
c.1476), chief justice in the reign of Henry VI, wrote, a king needed a
rich store of money to meet unforeseen and extraordinary expenses, to
send ambassadors abroad, despatch an army to war or maintain his own
magnificence. By that last phrase, maintaining the king’s magnificence,
Fortescue meant a king should have enough resources (he called it “treas-
ure’) so that:

he may make new buildings when he will, for his pleasure and magnificence;
and as he may buy himself rich clothing, rich furs ... rich stones, fine linen,
belts and other jewels and ornaments.‘

In brief, if a king could not make such a public show, he was no true
king but a poorer man than his subjects. As Fortescue knew only too
well, Henry VI had never been sufficiently interested in maintaining his
magnificence; by losing his throne he paid the price for that neglect. His
successor and supplanter, Edward IV, never made that mistake and nor
did Henry VII. The later Tudor rulers, including Mary, all demonstrated
how well they had learned that lesson, that the status of each individual
20 ESTABLISHING THE TUDOR REGIME

was most obviously maintained by his or her clothing and richness of

visual presence.
By the late 1490s, Henry VII felt sufficiently secure, and had amassed
sufficient ‘treasure’, to undertake an ambitious building programme as
one way of demonstrating the permanence of his dynasty. The building
that may have most impressed his contemporaries was Richmond Palace,
built to replace an older one at Sheen. It was partly modelled on the
more modern French and Burgundian palaces, and was an important
place in the lives of both Mary and Elizabeth Tudor even after their
father, Henry VIII, set about the acquisition of many more palaces and
houses than any previous English king had ever dreamed of owning.
Richmond was of particular interest for the emphasis on its grounds,
parkland and provision of facilities for many forms of leisure. The palace
had superb gardens, a good collection of wild beasts and one of the earli-
est tennis courts in England, foreshadowing the courtly pleasures so
prominent in the reign of Henry VII.
But Richmond Palace has long since vanished, and the building for
which the first Tudor is now best remembered is the elaborate chapel he
added to Westminster Abbey. From the first, it was designed as a worthy
monument to the new Tudor dynasty. Significantly, given the religious
upheavals of the next reign, it was conceived within the terms of an
entirely orthodox late-medieval piety. To build the new chapel it was
necessary to pull down an older, smaller one and a nearby tavern, which
appropriately enough, given its demolition to make way for Tudor gran-
deur, was called the White Rose. Henry’s ornately decorated and
furnished chapel was still incomplete when he died in 1509, although
by then it had already cost some £14,000 — a very considerable amount
to spend on a chapel, however serious its dynastic aspirations.
This particular use for Henry VII's ‘treasure’ was politically very _
important. The project was designed to reiterate the links between the
Tudor dynasty and the last Lancastrian king, Henry VI. The new Lady
Chapel was planned so that Henry VII's tomb could be as close to that
of Henry VI as possible, thereby reinforcing the fragile Tudor claim to
the throne. The familial importance of the project was signified by the
request of Henry VII for prayers to be said for his soul ‘while the world
shall endure’ and prayers for his father, his mother, his wife, and the
souls of their children and issue. The first Tudor tomb was placed before
the altar, with superb effigies of Henry VII and his wife above their
 ESTABLISHING THE TUDOR REGIME 21

shared tomb, anticipating their final bodily resurrection with Christ.

(The tomb is still there and intact but the effigies, provided by order of
Henry VIII, are difficult for visitors to see clearly.) The whole design
speaks forcefully to the complex of religious and dynastic imperatives
which had driven the first Tudor on. His three regnant Tudor grandchil-
dren, Edward, Mary and Elizabeth were also buried there, although only
Elizabeth has a tomb and effigy.
Because of his ongoing need to secure the new dynasty, Henry VII
had particular need of international recognition. His greatest diplomatic
coup was in matching his elder son, Arthur, Prince of Wales, with
Katherine, the fourth and youngest daughter of Isabella of Castile and
Ferdinand of Aragon. A Tudor alliance with the Spanish court, con-
firmed in 1489, meant also an alliance with the oldest royal house in
Western Europe, that of Castile. When Henry VII ordered celebratory
masses to be said for the Christian capture of Granada, the last Moorish
kingdom in Spain, it is hard to know whether he was more concerned to
join other Christian monarchs in celebrating a reversal of Islam or in cel-
ebrating the success of his good allies and the family of his prospective
daughter-in-law.
The strength of the new Tudor regime was confirmed in several ways
before the marriage of Arthur and Katherine in 1501. The least appealing
was probably the execution of Edward, Earl of Warwick, held prisoner
in the Tower of London since 1485. It is likely that Spanish interests
had demanded his death before Katherine was permitted to sail for
England As the only son of George, Duke of Clarence, a brother of
Edward IV, Warwick was the last available heir to the throne with
unbroken descent through the male line from Edward III and, therefore,
with the strongest Plantagenet claim to the English throne. He had
taken no part in any conspiracies, and his death in 1499 was widely seen
as an act of judicial murder, not least by its most obvious beneficiary,
Katherine of Aragon. Perhaps as an act of contrition, Henry VII paid for
Warwick’s funeral.
That death would be remembered at intervals for the next three dec-
ades as one explanation for various disasters which befell the Tudors.
Warwick's end is the more striking when compared with the fate of two
other Yorkist pretenders to the throne, both actively engaged in raising
rebellion. In 1487 Lambert Simnel, who had briefly masqueraded as the
Earl of Warwick, and been crowned King Edward VI in Dublin, was put
272) ESTABLISHING THE: TUDOR REGIME

to work in Henry VII’s kitchens after his capture. From 1491 Perkin
Warbeck, who presented himself as Richard (the younger of the two
sons of Edward VI and apparently miraculously escaped from the Tower
some time in 1483), received support from both internal and foreign
opponents of the Tudor regime. That made him a much more significant
threat. Once captured, in 1497, he was sent to the Tower, but hanged
only after he tried to escape to resume his resistance to Henry VU.
The death of the real Earl of Warwick, however, was not the end of
the descendents of the Duke of Clarence. Warwick’s only sister, Margaret
Plantagenet, had been married off to Richard Pole, a man whose only
claim to such a high-born wife was that he was nephew to Margaret
Beaufort’s half-sister. Befriended by Katherine of Aragon, who always
felt some responsibility for the death of her brother, Margaret Pole later
received the title of Countess of Salisbury, and became governess and
close associate to the young Mary Tudor. But as will be discussed later,
her Yorkist descent finally helped render her yet another victim of Henry
VII, along with one of her sons. Her third son, Reginald Pole, in exile
for many years, was to become one of Henry VIII’s most trenchant crit-
ics after his divorce from Katherine of Aragon, a cardinal, and the last
Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury during the reign of Mary Tudor.
But that was all in the future. In 1501, all the immediate barriers to
Arthur’s wedding to Katherine of Aragon had been overcome. The arrival
of Katherine in England, her reception and the ensuing marriage of Henry
VII's heir and the Spanish princess were all celebrated as great landmarks
for the Tudor dynasty. The planning had been under way for 18 months
before the princess actually arrived in England; one purpose of the celebra-
tions was to display the Tudor court to an international audience as being
as splendid as any other in Europe. Katherine brought with her a house-
hold of 60 attendants. Her retinue was immediately joined by English
lords, and their retinues, to meet their every need, and soon after by the
Duchess of Norfolk and a company of countesses, baronesses and leading
gentlewomen, all with their attendants. Henry VII still felt the attendance
on her was insufficient and rode south to meet her with his own company
of dukes, earls, barons, knights and gentlemen, and all their attendants.
The young Prince Arthur and his retinue then rode from his residence at
Ludlow Castle to meet the princess as well.
When Henry VU, who had little Latin, first met the Spanish princess,
communication was difficult, since Katherine was so nervous that her
 ESTABLISHING THE TUDOR REGIME 23
French failed her. So the king spoke English and the princess spoke
Spanish for, although she had been addressed as Princess of Wales since
she was first betrothed at the age of three, Katherine had never been
taught to speak English. As Katherine’s journey to England approached,
messages were sent from both Queen Elizabeth and Margaret Beaufort,
asking that, since she knew no English, Katherine should practise her
French with fluent speakers. Neither of the English ladies understood
Latin, much less Spanish, but both were fluent in French. Knowledge of
French was widespread among early-Tudor women at the highest social
levels, but there is no evidence of any English laywoman, however well
born, who had learned Latin before the reign of Henry VII. The English
royal women were well aware that Arthur’s bride was fluent in Latin,
and Margaret for one regretted she had never been able to study that lan-
guage. Katherine, brilliantly educated in Latin, was thereby familiar
with Christian classical poets, the Church fathers such as Ambrose and
Augustine, such pagan writers as Seneca, and many historians and legal
writers. Also fluent in several languages, it seems very probable that she
provided the model on which the famously well-educated aristocratic
women of the next generation of high-born Tudor women was based.
Katherine’s entry into London in late 1501 was an occasion for very
elaborate celebrations; it has been described as perhaps the greatest ever
masterpiece of English civic pageantry.’ It also reiterated the Tudor
inheritance into which the Spanish princess was about to marry. There
were many red roses, as a further reiteration of Henry VII's Lancastrian
inheritance. There were, however, no white roses for Arthur’s Yorkist
inheritance; this was a time for promoting the new Tudor dynasty. The
public ceremonies surrounding the welcome for Katherine and the ensu-
ing wedding were also among the first occasions when Arthur's younger
brother Henry appeared in public. The then ten-year-old prince rode in
a prominent position in the various processions and danced at the wed-
ding celebrations with a vigour and grace which caught many eyes, and
delighted his parents.
It was, on the other hand, an ominous sign for the future that during
those wedding celebrations Arthur was not permitted to take part in the
jousting because, although now 14, he was deemed too young and frag-
ile to do so. There was also some debate about the question of whether
the young couple should cohabit, Arthur being two years younger than
Katherine and not robust. But the married couple set out together for
24 ESTABLISHING THE TUDOR REGIME

Ludlow soon after, pausing to spend some time at the home of Lady
Margaret Beaufort. The royal heir’s grandmother had spent money pro-
digiously, even by Tudor standards, on cloth of gold, silks and velvets
for her residence overlooking the Thames at Coldharbour, to provide an
appropriate setting for the new royal couple. Arthur had little time to
resume learning the arts of government for he died at Ludlow, it was
said of consumption, some four months later. Katherine, now the
Dowager Princess of Wales, was too ill to be part of her late husband’s
funeral ceremonies.
The following years were increasingly difficult for her. One matter
which was to become a question of wide public debate three decades
later was that of whether the marriage between Katherine and the sickly,
younger Arthur had ever been consummated. On that question depended
the settlement of her dower rights in England and payment of the
remainder of her dowry from Spain. Katherine told her parents that,
although she and Arthur had shared a bed on several occasions, the mar-
riage was unconsummated. With that statement the ladies of her
household all agreed. Such a consummation was more unlikely because
of the ill health and immaturity of Arthur; it was also unlikely that
Katherine would lie about the matter, particularly to her mother. It was,
however, in the interests of the English to believe otherwise, both then
— since it determined whether they were to be paid the rest of her dowry,
or be required to repay to Spain the portion they had received — and
many years later, when Henry VIII wished to repudiate his marriage to
her on the grounds of her imputed consummated marriage to his
brother.
In the following years, Katherine remained in England while issues
of her dowry and possible marriage to Henry VII's next heir were
debated. After the death in childbirth of Elizabeth of York in 1503, the
king even briefly contemplated marrying Katherine himself. By 1504
international alliances were shifting as two of Henry’s most important
international allies, Ferdinand of Aragon and the Emperor Maximilian,
fell out over which of the two should control Castile on behalf
of Isabella’s
nominated heir, her daughter Juana. (The nominal queen herself was
quickly thrust aside, and soon confined as insane.) As his own interna-
tional alignments shifted, Henry VII adopted very different attitudes
from those of his original welcome towards his widowed daughter-in-
law, detaining her because of his continuing disputes with her father
 ESTABLISHING THE TUDOR REGIME 25
over her dowry, and maintaining her in increasingly reduced
circumstances.
Despite the increasing stability of his regime, Henry VII could never
feel entirely secure against potential claimants to his throne. Indeed,
that insecurity, and the associated imprisonment or deaths of potential
rivals, continued well into the reign of Henry VIII. As one example,
after the execution of the Earl of Warwick in 1499, the strongest surviv-
ing Yorkist pretender to the throne was Edmund de la Pole, a nephew of
Edward IV. About 1503, one John Flamank reported to Henry VII the
gist of a conversation he had taken part in at Calais some months before.
It was a striking indication of how much uncertainty there still was
about the probable successor to the then king. Flamank reported that
various of the king’s leading men at Calais had been discussing possible
successors to the present king. The names under consideration included
the third Duke of Buckingham, who traced his descent back to Edward
III, some saying ‘that he was a noble man and would be a royal ruler’.
Other candidates included Henry’s ‘traitor’ Edmund de la Pole, then
still at large; ‘but none of them ... spoke of my lord prince (the young
Henry). Presumably, from Henry’s perspective, the most disturbing
aspect of this troubling conversation was that no one present showed
commitment toa continuing Tudor dynasty. As it happened, De la Pole,
a refugee in Flanders, was surrendered to England in 1506, with the pro-
viso that the Yorkist heir would not be harmed. He was, indeed, kept
safely cloistered in the Tower, for the rest of the reign of the first Tudor
king. Henry VIII, however, as a safety measure before he invaded France
in 1513 had the man summarily executed. The deaths of other possible,
and sometimes improbable, claimants were to follow later.

THE ACCESSION OF HENRY VIII

When Henry VII died in 1509, he had no significant enemies still at

large abroad, and he had progressively subdued the opposition at home.
He left his heir, another Henry, a relatively settled realm and an abun-
dance of‘treasure’, but he felt increasingly uneasy about the way some of
those riches had been acquired. In the last weeks of his life, his mind had
turned much to ensuring the salvation of his soul; his will addressed the
same concerns. After the death of Henry VIHL, one ofhis closest confidantes,
26 ESTABLISHING THE TUDOR REGIME

Edmund Dudley, declared himself also concerned to help redress past

injustices ‘for the help and relief of {the late king’s} soul’. Dudley him-
self, now describing himself as ‘the most wretched and sorrowful
creature’, accordingly set out many details of Henry VII’s most trou-
bling scheme, in which Dudley and Richard Empson had served him
faithfully. He described in detail Henry VII’s far-reaching practice ‘to
have many persons in his danger at his pleasure’, which he had achieved
by frequently threatening — and levying — arbitrary fines on any subjects
who incurred his displeasure or suspicion.
It is not surprising that this had been a very unpopular policy, and as
the scholar who recovered Dudley’s petition remarked, scapegoats were
needed. ‘The reputation of the dead king was of some importance to his
son; the reputation of the new king, as the enemy of injustice, was of
even more importance.’ And so one of Henry VIII’s first acts as he
entered upon his inheritance was to offer up two of his father’s closest
and most trusted associates as sacrificial victims to the reputation of the
Tudors. Both Dudley and Empson had been imprisoned within two days
of the new king’s accession, and were soon found guilty of treason and
subsequently executed as the villains of Henry VII’s administrative
practices.
Henry VIII's ruthlessness in defending his interests and the interests
of his realm as he understood them was thereby demonstrated at the
beginning of his reign and would often be demonstrated again. Both his
daughters were to suffer from a similar ruthlessness towards their moth-
ers, and towards themselves when they might be challenging his will.
Her father’s nature and his capacity to apply relentless pressure, where
he more usually demonstrated considerable affection, was to be a forma-
tive influence in shaping Mary’s character. It is time to turn to from the
wider background to a more detailed discussion of Mary’s family life.
Exploring the Variety of Random
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"Father and mother and I have begun to find out that you haven't
been thinking of yourself at all, from start to finish," cried Arthur.
"Maybe that is why all your friends like you."
This unexpected compliment took David aback, and all he could
think of to say in parting was:
"You'll hear from me by to-morrow. It's all a game of figuring out
what is right to do."
David watched the boat move shoreward, until it dodged behind a
string of barges, and then he returned to Margaret in the cabin. She
made a gallant effort to face the issue which they had argued over
and over again.
"It all happened just right that Mr. Becket was willing to come as
mate," she began, "but oh, the whole beautiful plan seems so empty
without you, Davy. Why can't you sail with us? Grandfather says he
will make you third mate at the end of this voyage. And you will be
just drudging along in the Roanoke for years and years, before you
can get that far."
"It is different with Mr. Becket," replied David, with a sigh. "He is
almost fifty years old, and he needs a position. Besides, he stands a
fine chance to be master of the Sea Witch when Captain John
retires. But I am just beginning, and I belong in steam."
Margaret was unconvinced, as she looked up at him with
affectionate pride.
"I suppose you know what is best, Davy, and I want you to succeed
more than anything else in the world. Duty is a queer thing anyhow.
The Cochrans think I ought to stay ashore and go to school. But I
know better. There never was a wiser teacher than grandfather, and
he needs me, and school must wait. And you and I could study
together, Davy. Think of the months and months at sea."
"But it all comes down to this, Margaret. Answer me yes or no.
Which course do you want me to take? The one I ought to steer, or
the one I want to follow? There's the whole thing in a nutshell."
She thought it cruel of him to pin her down to this kind of an
answer, but she met his questions as squarely as Captain John would
have done.
"The course you ought to steer, if you have to take one or the
other," was her verdict.
"Then I go back to the Roanoke," declared David. "I've been veering
this way and that in my mind, but the things I've learned about duty
in the last year kind of help me to make a good finish of it. I must
stick it out as I started. We sail in the morning, Margaret, and we
may pass you going out. I can read any signals you set, and I'll
know they are meant for me."
"'Don't forget your dearest folks,' will be what I'm saying to you,
David," she answered, very softly.
David moved toward the companion-way. He saw how hard it was
for Margaret to keep back her tears, now that the parting was so
near.
"Don't forget me, little sister," he said, and his voice faltered. "I'll be
waiting for you, forever and ever, amen."
He meant more than was in his words, for the "little sister" was
dearer to him in this moment than she had ever been before. But he
could not tell her what was in his heart. They went on deck as
Captain Bracewell called out cheerily:
"I smell a shift of wind. We shall be under sail to-morrow. Why, the
breeze has painted roses in your cheeks already, Margaret. There's
nothing like getting to sea again. How about it, Davy Downes? Shall
I put your name on the ship's papers?"
"No, sir. I am an able seaman aboard the Roanoke. And I'm sorry
that I put you to the trouble of holding a berth open for me."
Captain Bracewell looked at the lad with approval, as he rejoined:
"It isn't always easy to get your true bearings, my boy, and maybe I
did wrong in trying to persuade you to sail with an old fogy like me.
We want you bad, but we're not going to stand in your way, hey,
Margaret?"
The "little sister" had nothing more to say. Her bright world was
clouded, and she could not look beyond this hour. It was Mr. Becket
who cheered them with his never-failing good humor. Coming aft for
orders, he stood surveying the silent group as if wondering what
misfortune had happened in his absence.
"Cheer up, my children," was his exhortation. "You've got what you
wanted, and what more do you want? Why, I didn't look as dismal as
all this when my last skipper chased me ashore, with his one whisker
whistlin' in the wind."
"David is going to leave us," said Margaret, solemnly.
"And what would we do with the useless little paint scrubber aboard
a real ship?" exclaimed Mr. Becket. "He's never been aloft in his life."
"Get forward with you, Mr. Becket," thundered the captain, and the
mate ducked down the ladder, as if he had been shot at. The time
was all too short before the Sea Witch reached an anchorage in the
lower bay. David was ready to leap aboard as the tug came
alongside. He was through with saying good-bys, and he lingered
only long enough to shake hands all round.
Margaret and he had tried to console themselves with the thought
that this was not really their last sight of each other. The liner would
be going out in the morning, and then it would be farewell in
earnest. But David was a lonesome and melancholy sailor as he
went aboard the Roanoke that night. The bos'n found him on duty at
the gangway, and took pity on his low spirits.
"It vas hard to lose friends, but it vas worse to have no friends to
lose, and all hands on deck, from the old man to his sawed-off leetle
cabin-boy knows that you haf been true to your friends and stuck by
your colors, boy. It vill do you no harm. I vas getting old, and there
is gray in my hair, and I vill never be a ship's officer. But if you does
your duty and sticks by your friends you will wear the blue coat mit
the brass stripes on the sleeve, and you will be glad you stayed by
steam."
"But I always wanted to be the kind of a seaman my father was,"
confided David, grateful for the cheer of this grizzled shipmate. "And
I've just left that kind of a ship-master and a vessel that made me
sort of choke all up to look at her."
Next morning came fair and sparkling, with a fresh wind out of the
north-west that set the harbor to dancing. The liner's decks were
crowded with passengers in holiday mood. From her huge funnels
poured clouds of black smoke, to tell the water front that she was
eager to be free and hurrying over seas. Promptly on the stroke of
ten, as if she were moved by clockwork, the decks trembled to the
thresh of her giant screws, hawsers came writhing in to the rattle of
donkey-engines fore and aft, and the black hull of the liner slid
slowly past her pier.
Up in the bow, able seaman David Downes waved his cap to Arthur
Cochran who had come down to see him off. Their friendship had
been knit closer by the sailing of the Sea Witch, and David glowed at
the thought of the message which Mr. Cochran, senior, had sent to
the steamer by his boy:
"Tell the able seaman that I wasn't as crazy as I seemed when I
bought the Sea Witch overnight. If he had wanted her for himself it
would have been another matter. But I did it to please him as much
as to please the old skipper and my boy. Tell him he has helped me
to know what friendship means, in a world where I thought that kind
of thing had gone out of style."
As the Roanoke neared Sandy Hook, David saw far ahead a row of
tall spars astern of a tug. He forgot his work and rushed to the rail.
It was the Sea Witch, and the liner would pass close to her. Soon
little patches of white began to break out among the yards of the
ship ahead. The bos'n stood beside David and growled in his ear:
"You must not loaf on deck, boy, but maybe a minute won't hurt
nothings. It vas a good sight, that. I know it all. Now I hear the
captain say to the mate, 'Set your jibs.' And next it is, 'Set your
staysails.' And then it is, 'Loose your lower topsails.' Then the mate
vill sing out to the men, 'Haul away the lee sail,' or 'Overhaul the
main-top-gallant bunt-lines.' But I am an old fool and you are a
young loafer. Get along mit you."
As if by magic, the white canvas was spreading higher and higher
above the low hull of the Sea Witch, until her royals seemed like bits
of the clouds that drifted in the blue sky. As David answered a
summons from the bridge, he overheard Captain Thrasher say:
"Very smartly done. The old man must have shipped a good crew.
Wonder where he got 'em? That's the way Yankee ships used to
make sail when I was a boy."
David felt a thrill of pride as if he had a personal share in this
welcome praise. The liner was overhauling the Sea Witch hand over
hand. David was straining his eyes to make out the flutter of a skirt
on the quarter-deck. The ship was still too far away, however, and
his attention was caught for a moment by the surprised voice of the
bos'n:
"Holy schmokes, your granddaddy is gettin' up his sky-sails. He vill
give us a race, eh?"
Sure enough, the sailors of the Sea Witch could be seen working in
mid-air, and presently the tiny squares of canvas gleamed above her
royals. "It is to show this old tea-kettle what a Yankee ship can do,"
quoth the bos'n.
No more stately and beautiful sea picture could be imagined than
the Sea Witch, when Captain Bracewell had put her under this
staggering press of sail. The wind was humming through the stays
of the Roanoke's apologies for masts, and it smote the Sea Witch
with a driving power, which heeled her until the copper of her hull
gleamed like a belt of gold against the white-capped Atlantic.
David could see Margaret leaning against the weather rail of the
poop, her hair blowing in the jolly wind, as she shaded her eyes and
gazed at the liner's decks. Nor could this daughter of the deep sea
have asked for a more fitting accompaniment for her farewell to
David than the roaring chorus which floated from amidships of the
Sea Witch. Captain Bracewell had bullied and bribed the shipping
masters of New York to find him Yankee seamen. It was a hard task
that he set them, but by hook and crook he had gathered a dozen
deep-water "shell-backs" of the old breed among his thirty foremast
hands, and they knew the old-time sailors' chanties. Now, as they
swayed and hauled on sheets and braces, their lusty chorus came
faint and clear to the liner:

"Come all ye young fellows that follow the sea,

With a yeo, ho, blow the man down,
And pray pay attention and listen to me,
Oh, give me some time to blow the man down."

Soon the chorus changed as the topsail yards were swayed:

"We're outward bound this very day,

Good-by, fare you well,
Good-by, fare you well.
We're outward bound this very day,
Hurrah, my boys, we're outward bound."

The passengers of the liner were cheering. Here were sights and
sounds which they had read about in romances of the sea. But David
was no longer thinking of the ship yonder. He was blowing kisses to
the "little girl" who had crossed the deck and was standing with one
arm about the captain of the Sea Witch. Over their heads was set a
row of signal flags to speak their parting message:
"All's well. Love and greetings."
Captain Thrasher turned his whistle valve, and the Roanoke bellowed
a courteous "Good-day to you." Stronger and more musical than
before came the sailors' chorus:

"Hurrah, my boys, we're outward bound."

Captain Thrasher chanced to catch a glimpse of the lad with the

radiant face, who was leaning over the rail of the deck below him.
With a kindly impulse, he sent a boy to call David to the bridge.
"You can see them a little better here," said the captain. "I take it
that you're pretty sorry to leave those shipmates of yours. Did you
want to go with them?"
The young able seaman stood very straight, and his square jaw was
firm-set, as he replied:
"Yes, sir. But I decided to stay with you."
The captain of the liner understood the boy's struggle. He made no
comment, but said to one of his officers:
"Tell the quartermaster to sheer a little closer to that ship. I may
want to speak her."
David looked his gratitude, and was on edge with excitement, as he
gazed down at the white deck of the Sea Witch, and wondered if his
voice could carry that far. Perhaps he might hear Margaret call to
him. She had seen him go to the bridge. Her face was upturned, and
she had picked up a speaking-trumpet.
 David gazed down at the white deck of the Sea Witch.
Just then the fourth officer of the Roanoke brushed past David. He
was bare-headed, his coat was torn, and there was blood on his
face. He addressed the captain, as if short of breath:
"If you please, sir, two of those insane steerage passengers we are
deporting have broken out, and are running amuck below. The rest
of the people are scared clean off their heads, and I want more help
to handle 'em."
The discipline which had become an instinct with Captain Thrasher
caused him to grasp at whatever assistance was nearest to save
every second of time he could. He saw David at his elbow, and
snapped at him:
"Down you go! Jump! I'll send more help in a minute or two."
David cast one glance at the deck of the Sea Witch. Margaret had
never looked so dear to him as now, when she was almost within
speaking distance. The pleading disappointment in David's face was
not unobserved by Captain Thrasher, but his grim features were
unmoved as he repeated, more sharply:
"Don't stand like a dummy! Below with you!"
A sweet, shrill hail came from the quarter-deck of the Sea Witch,
"Oh, David, ahoy!"
David heard it, but he did not turn to look over the side. The
doctrine of duty had never been so hard to swallow, but with his jaw
set hard and his fists shut tight he ran after the fourth officer. A
bedlam of noises came from the steerage quarters, groans and
shrieks and prayers. Re-enforced by two more seamen, the officer
and David charged into the uproar. Three stewards and a
quartermaster had pinned the insane foreigners in a corner, and
were trying to put strait-jackets on them. It was a difficult task, even
with more help, and the panic of the other Hungarians, Russians,
and Poles had grown to the size of a riot. David pitched in with the
momentum of a centre-rush, and after several sharp tussles looked
around him to find that his doughty comrades had done their duty
well. His impulse was to rush on deck for a sight of the Sea Witch,
but his duty was to await orders.
"Stand guard over these poor lunatics till you are relieved," grunted
the fourth officer.
David's face turned very red, he winked hard and tried to hold back
the words that rushed to his lips:
"But I must go on deck, sir. I—I—" he broke off and steadied himself
with a great effort. Before the amazed officer could reply to this
mutinous outburst David had come to himself. Discipline and duty
took command again, and he added in a tone of appeal:
"Please forget what I just said, sir. I didn't mean to talk back. Of
course I'll stay."
The officer cast a sour look at the lad, as if in half a mind to punish
him. Then with a gruff "Keep your tongue in your head next time,"
he went away.
David looked around at the speck of blue ocean which glinted
through an open porthole. Margaret's ship was out there, but he
could not see her. Every moment the liner and the Sea Witch were
drawing farther and farther apart. And Margaret—was she looking
for him, trying to send across the water her message: "Don't forget
your dearest folks"?
The disconsolate David, sulking in the steerage, was not wise
enough to know that in this trying hour he was doing that which
would have made his "dearest folks" happy in this big boy of theirs.
When at length he climbed on deck, the stately Sea Witch was hull-
down against the blue of the south-western sky. Lower and lower
dropped the pyramid of sail, until a fleck of white hung for an instant
on the horizon line. David rubbed his eyes, and looked again. The
Sea Witch had vanished.
He turned away and looked up at the bridge of the Roanoke. Captain
Thrasher was pacing his airy pathway, quiet, ready, masterful, while
the strength of fifteen thousand horses drove the Black Star liner
toward her goal. David Dowries was sure in his heart that he had
chosen the right way, although it was the hardest way. As the sun
went down, he gazed across the heaving sea where he had last
glimpsed the Sea Witch, and said to himself:
"What I ought to do, not what I want to do: that is the course
Captain John and Margaret told me to steer. And here is where I
belong."
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A CADET OF THE
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