Mary Tudor had only one policy: to restore the Church of England in all its pre-Reformation glory. Her first public act on reaching London was to issue a proclamation announcing her own inability ‘to hide that religion which God and the world knoweth she hath ever professed from her infancy’, and permitting and encouraging (though not at this stage compelling) her subjects to profess it likewise. This policy expressed a single underlying political attitude: conservatism, a preference for the old ways. To restore Catholicism was, in effect, to turn the clock back. It is not difficult to appreciate how natural it was for someone whose life had been torn apart in her teens to hanker for the way things were. Even her wedding, a year later, was an opportunity for her to parade her old-world values. Her wedding ring, she let it be known, was ‘a plain hoop of gold, with no stone in it... because maidens were so married in old times’.
Mary was a deeply religious woman, and nobody has ever impugned the sincerity and depth of her convictions, which were well known to her contemporaries. Among the clearest testimonies to this are the numerous religious books which were dedicated to her by authors and translators. By far the greater part of all dedications to Mary, whether as princess or as queen, were of religious texts. When Henry Parker, Lord Morley, broke with his usual practice by dedicating to her a translation of a secular work, Cicero’s Dream of Scipio, he acknowledged that it might therefore come as a surprise to her, but justified it on the grounds that Cicero, though a pagan, was a man of exemplary virtue. Although one cannot always take a dedication as evidence of a recipient’s beliefs or interests (for example, John Calvin dedicated his Institution of Christian Religion to Francis I of France, but one would hardly conclude from this that Francis was a Protestant!), when a person receives dedications overwhelmingly of one particular kind, it is reasonable to suppose that those seeking to give pleasure or to secure reward through these gifts had a fair idea of what would and would not be acceptable. Protestant authors did not bother dedicating books to Mary.
There was no room for compromise in Mary’s mentality. The only compromise in her personal history was when, after the death of her mother, she had humbled herself to accept her father’s proceedings: something she doubtless repented as a betrayal of herself, her mother, and her faith rather than reckoned a laudable or even an understandable means of self-preservation. Yet her attitude towards her father remained as queen what it had been as a princess - deeply ambivalent. She frequently lamented her womanliness, wishing she had the awesome charisma of her father so that she might properly rebuke the failings of her ministers and induce them to more zealous and effective service. The best she could do was to invoke her father’s memory: despite the notorious burnings, she never struck terror into her subjects’ hearts as her father had done.
If she had bent the knee before her father’s supremacy, she was less than obsequious to the authority of those who ruled in the name of her younger brother. Throughout Edward’s reign she had flouted the law by attending Mass in her private chapel, relying in part on her status as heir presumptive, and rather more on the diplomatic weight of her cousin, the Emperor Charles V, who for a while seemed set to turn the political tide of the Reformation in its very heartland, the Holy Roman Empire (essentially, modern Germany and Austria). Not that her position made resistance especially easy. Enormous pressure was brought to bear on her to give up the Mass. She was summoned for interviews with the Privy Council and with Edward VI in person, and was harangued at length by both. Representatives of the Council came to her palace at Havering to arrest her chaplains (fortunately for her they missed one, who, in hiding, ministered to Mary for the rest of the reign). During some of her interviews with the king and his advisers, Mary forthrightly proclaimed her readiness to die for her beliefs rather than give up the Mass. In that age of martyrdom, when the commitments and risks of religious conviction were so clearly appreciated by so many people, there is no reason to doubt that she would have proved as good as her word. Nobody ever questioned her courage, though some preferred to put a less favourable interpretation upon it. Thomas Cromwell was not far from the mark when, back in 1536, he described her as ‘the most obstinate woman that ever was’.
World History
