The war with France which occupied the last year of Mary’s reign was the only episode in which her marriage to Philip had direct and damaging policy implications for her kingdom. Again, Mary has been criticised unduly for this entanglement, largely because of the fortuitous loss of Calais in January 1558. The decision to go to war was driven primarily by her husband, in pursuit of his own ambitions in the Netherlands. It was disputed bitterly by her Privy Council, many of whose members rightly saw no English interests at stake. Cardinal Pole urged peace as a matter of principle. Philip had to return briefly to England to lobby for war, and the argument was only swung when the French foolishly backed a hopeless plot against Mary, arming a noble adventurer, Thomas Stafford, who landed at Scarborough in April 1557, seized the castle, and was captured within a couple of days. War was now a matter of honour, and was by no means a transparently doomed policy. War with France was, after all, a return to the best traditions of English monarchy stretching back over 200 years. There was no problem in recruiting young nobles and gentry to fight alongside the Spanish against the old enemy. For example, the three surviving Dudley brothers all served in this war, and Robert’s service as Master of the Ordnance secured his family’s restoration in blood. Mary’s critics sometimes seem to overlook the fact that the Anglo-Spanish alliance actually won the war at the decisive battle of Saint-Quentin (August 1557).
It was the loss of Calais, which had been in English hands since the reign of Edward III, that spoiled the party. In the long term, it was a blessing in disguise, but at the time the disguise seemed pretty effective. The fall of Calais was a national humiliation of the first order. Mary, as the personal embodiment of the nation, inevitably felt it as a personal affront. Yet the loss itself was probably sealed only by her death. If Philip had still been, with Mary, upon the throne of England during the peace negotiations of 1559 at Cateau-Cambresis, he might not have been so ready to abandon the English bridgehead in France. Had she lived, Mary would certainly have strained every nerve to regain it. After her death, the fall of Calais came to be seen as a providential judgement against her for her persecution of the ‘gospel’ (though why God should have given Calais to the French, who were burning almost as many Protestants as the English, is anybody’s guess!).
Ironically, the war with France also impeded the policy closest to Mary’s heart - the restoration of Catholicism. For Pope Paul IV was bitterly opposed to Habsburg hegemony in Italy, and was therefore a bellicose ally of France against Philip II. Pope Paul added to political enmity a personal hatred of Cardinal Pole (they had been rivals in the papal curia throughout the 1540s), whom he summoned to Rome on bizarre charges of heresy. Mary refused to hand him over, and was obliged to invoke the kind of arguments which her father had deployed in the early days of the break with Rome in order to justify her disobedience. The Pope, in return, refused to approve any new appointments to replace the bishops who were then dying off at an alarming rate.
World History
