PROPAGANDA

Notwithstanding the endlessly repeated (and statistically far from well founded) assertions that Mary did not understand the power of the press and was outgunned by exiled Protestant propagandists, her regime was effective enough in putting across its message - essentially, religion and obedience, much like the message of any other Tudor monarch. It is true that exiled Protestants printed much more theological controversy than Catholics, but it is less clear how widely this circulated, or how effective it was. It was not enough to print books: they had to be delivered to their readers. There is not much evidence to suggest that the refugees’ printing effort had an enormous impact on the domestic market. As with the prodigious propaganda efforts of the Catholic refugees in Europe under Queen Elizabeth, such literature was more to do with sustaining the spirits of an embattled minority than with recruiting mass support. The Marian authorities were quite happy to concentrate on mass-producing devotional, liturgical and instructional texts which would do more than polemics to rebuild and fortify Catholic attitudes.

A more justifiable criticism of Mary is that she lacked her sister’s flair for showmanship. Her entry to London was inevitably part victory parade and part military column, as it was a show of strength as well as a display of dynastic legitimacy. So her retinue of 10,000 made the most important point. But while few events of this kind fall entirely flat, hers certainly left no golden moments in the popular memory. Her coronation celebrations were equally staid and somewhat old-fashioned. Wine flowed from the fountains, and rejoicing was inevitable. But there was nothing beyond the script, no impromptu rapport with the London crowd of the kind which came naturally to Elizabeth. The ceremonies themselves were more a matter of medieval munificence than Renaissance inventiveness. Sheer expense and opulence of dress and decor were emphasised rather than the emblematic pageantry sometimes seen under Henry and more often under Elizabeth. Not that Mary was without some sense of herself and her image. In a typically Catholic fashion, she took her patron saint, the Blessed Virgin Mary, as her role model. Some of her more imaginative propaganda exploited this association, as did Mary herself from time to time - notably in her account of her reception of Cardinal Pole. In Edward’s reign, her entourage had ridden into London to escort her to a meeting with the king, all wearing rosaries as a kind of badge of allegiance to both Maries. In Mary’s reign, Elizabeth rather pointedly refrained from making any use of the ornate rosary with which her sister presented her.

The adequacy of Mary’s governmental machinery is best assessed in the perspective provided by the incoming government of her successor, Queen Elizabeth. One thing the new regime was quite clear about was the existence and effectiveness of that body of ‘good Catholic men’ upon whom Mary’s council had relied in local government. In sizing up the prospects for a Protestant religious settlement, Elizabeth’s advisers saw Mary’s appointees as a major political obstacle, foreseeing the discontent of:

All such as governed in the late Queen Mary’s time, and were chosen thereto for no other cause,

Or were then most esteemed, for being hot and earnest in the other religion.

They also noted the preponderance of ‘the papist sect’ among the judiciary and the justices of the peace in the shires. Mary’s government chased Protestants out of public office far sooner than Elizabeth’s got rid of Catholics (who were still being purged from many positions and institutions in the 1570s), and in consequence its religious policy took effect more quickly at the local level. The Elizabethan authorities had a harder time getting rid of Catholic liturgical gear in the 1560s than the Marian authorities had reinstalling it in the 1550s. While Elizabeth deserves credit for not engaging in savage repression of Catholics in the 1560s, it is not clear that her government could in fact have implemented such a policy.

None of which is to suggest that Mary’s reign was some oasis of good governance. Both the threat and the use of torture are mentioned with disturbing and revealing frequency in the minutes of the Privy Council. And it was not just the execution of heretics that the council encouraged. Local authorities were again and again urged to hang traitors, murderers, highwaymen, pirates and other felons. There is a sense of insecurity about all this. Yet it is not so very different from the domestic policy of the Duke of Northumberland, so many of whose administrative colleagues were still in post. And we should probably trace this neither to malice nor to incompetence, but to hard times. The Elizabethan regime of the 1590s was rather similar to Mary’s in its feel, and for much the same reasons. England in the 1550s was barely beginning to recover from the fiscal squeeze and currency devaluations which had financed the wars of the 1540s. Poor harvests and recurrent epidemic disease slowed recovery, and there was little as yet to replace the monasteries in dealing with the problem of the poor. The return of war in 1557-58 only made things worse. Yet government coped, if barely. The revaluation of customs duties in 1558 may have been a desperate fiscal expedient - but it was successfully implemented. The burning of heretics became the acid test for Mary’s government. It was unpopular and it often needed to be forced upon unwilling shire and diocesan functionaries. Yet it continued right to the end. It was cruel. But it was not incompetent, and it was not in any sense the sign of a regime in meltdown.