Although the role of the nobility was changing in Tudor times, good relations with the nobility remained the essence of kingship. Mary was on excellent terms with her nobles, not so much because of any special talent in the management of men as because of her unmistakable commitment to aristocratic values and prejudices. The fundamental conservatism of her reign was as much social as religious. And as the social order had not been challenged to the same degree as the religious order, its conservation was less innovative. Part of the explanation for the size of Mary’s council seems to lie in her implicit acceptance of the aristocratic account of power and counsel. As we have seen, she shared the ancient nobility’s disdain for the low-born careerists whom her father had brought into his service and even raised to the peerage. By being generous with the title of councillor she satisfied noble aspirations without overburdening the machinery of central government with dead souls. The Duke of Norfolk and the Courtenay heir to the earldom of Devon were both released promptly from the Tower, and the repeal of acts of attainder against their families were among the first statutes of the reign. The ancient Norfolk proved a broken reed during Wyatt’s Rebellion, and young Courtenay’s lack of wisdom and experience was woefully exposed by the same crisis. But aristocratic sensibilities, ruffled by religious change and political upheaval, were soothed by such gestures. The ancient house of Percy, once ‘cock of the north’, humbled and expropriated by Henry VIII in the wake of the Pilgrimage of Grace, was restored to something of its former power and glory in the north, and regained from the upstart Dudleys the title of Northumberland, albeit reduced once more to an earldom. Across in Ireland, the Fitzgeralds, smashed by Henry VIII in the 1530s, were brought back inside the charmed circle and enjoyed once more the island’s premier earldom of Kildare. Although ethnic conflict between the English and the Irish remained the running sore of politics there, Mary’s reign healed some of the emerging divisions between the new English, officials and settlers sent over from England, and the old English, descendants of the Anglo-Norman conquerors.
Far from being alienated from her regime, the nobility and gentry were loyal and often enthusiastic supporters of the Crown. Very few joined in any plots against her. The southern earls (Arundel, Bedford, Huntingdon and Pembroke) were unhesitatingly loyal in the crisis of early 1554, as were barons such as Clinton and Abergavenny. The Earl of Westmorland acted swiftly to crush the ill-fated invasion of Thomas Stafford at Scarborough in 1557. There was no difficulty finding gentlemen to fight in the campaigns of the French war of 1557-58. The continuing development of the Lord Lieutenancy guaranteed many peers a central place in the emerging system of county government. Nobles flocked to the ceremonial occasions of Mary’s reign, such as her coronation and her wedding, which provided them with the chance to display their national political importance before a domestic and an international audience. Six of England’s earls were named among her executors.
One of the indexes by which historians seek to measure the success or failure of monarchs is the frequency with which they faced revolts or rebellions. The reign of
Mary is often singled out for its problems in exacting obedience and enforcing order. Her reign can be presented as a succession of plots and risings, and if these are made the evidence of weakness, then the case for her weakness is proven. Yet this is far from fair, and another example of the double standards that can still flaw historical judgement. The almost continuous series of plots which plagued Elizabeth in the 1580s and 1590s is quite rightly interpreted as evidence not for the weakness of the regime but for the desperation of its opponents. Realising that Mary’s Protestant opponents were less numerous, less influential and less strongly supported from abroad than Elizabeth’s Catholic opponents can help us put the events of Mary’s reign in perspective. On only one occasion after her accession was Mary seriously threatened by a rebellion: when Sir Thomas Wyatt led what was meant to be a national rising, but turned out to be just another Kentish revolt. Coming as it did so early in the reign, it is no fairer to condemn Mary on this account than it would be to condemn Henry V on account of the Oldcastle Rising of 1414 (which, like Wyatt’s revolt, combined religious dissidence, a rather limited noble discontent, political dissatisfaction with the regime, and ineffectual aspirations to nationwide conspiracy). Each of the other four Tudor monarchs faced larger rebellions than Mary ever did.
World History
