Philip’s second visit to England (March to July 1557) was essentially political, but had its personal aspects. To a modern eye, the marriage of Philip and Mary might well seem to have been over, yet they presumably slept together, as a little later Mary once more fancied herself pregnant. Scepticism was widespread, and no one but Mary was surprised when the due date, in April 1558, came and went with no sign of labour. The symptoms of pregnancy changed imperceptibly into the symptoms of what was to be her final illness. She had made her will in March, in the expectation of facing the perils of childbirth. Thereafter, she prepared her soul for death. But neither her husband nor her councillors could induce her to provide for the succession. In fact, there was no option now but to recognise Elizabeth, which Mary simply could not bear to do. Right at the end, she acknowledged the inevitable, and sent a message and her blessing to her sister, hoping against hope for the preservation of her religion.
Mary Tudor died on 17 November 1558. Although she had been sickening for a long time, she may very well have been killed by the virus that was decimating her people, an early variety of influenza which in the two or three years around 1558 carried off as much as a fifth of the English population. There could not have been a worse time to die. The loss of Calais, the costs of war, and the social and economic dislocation consequent upon epidemic disease and poor harvests meant that her five years on the throne closed in an atmosphere of gloom and crisis which has unfairly coloured later perceptions of her entire reign.
In the end, Mary failed. She did not save England for Roman Catholicism. But she did not fail completely. She did save Roman Catholicism in England. Until her successful bid for the throne stopped the rot, Catholicism in England had been in retreat for six years and under pressure for twenty. Although much of the structures and practices of Catholicism survived under Henry VIII, the royal supremacy and its consequential subordination of religious truth to the royal will had sapped its inner strength. That is why resistance was so limited and ineffective under Edward VI.
What Mary’s reign did was to restore the Catholic sense of identity. Indeed, her reign arguably created the Catholic sense of identity, at least in the English context, as it was in her reign that the words ‘Protestant’ and ‘Catholic’ first took on the mutually defining and mutually exclusive senses they still carry in English.
Mary might not have expected death as early as it came for her, but could perhaps be criticised for failing to provide for the security of her achievement. Whether she really understood that she would never bear children is doubtful. Did she know enough of the ways of the flesh to work it out for herself? Even if any of her ladies in waiting had the courage to tell her, she would not have been able to cope with such a final dashing of her hopes, the entire destruction of her sense of identity and purpose. So perhaps she should not be blamed too harshly for failing to provide against a contingency which she could not bear to contemplate. Nor does her political career give reason to believe that she would have been able to solve the problem. She was not ruthless enough to destroy her sister (the suggestion of some of her councillors, hardened by service to Henry VIII), and she had perhaps learned from their brother’s attempt to frustrate their succession that, failing an heir of her own body, nothing short of death would keep Elizabeth off the throne. Elizabeth, like Mary, was to face the challenge of ruling as a woman in a man’s world. Famously, she would do so by developing the persona of the Virgin Queen. Mary Tudor sacrificed her virginity in the hope of motherhood. Having modelled herself upon Our Lady, Virgin and Mother, her personal tragedy was to end up neither the one nor the other.
World History
