The peculiar circumstances of Mary’s accession were largely responsible for what has long been one of the most vehemently criticised features of her regime: the unmanageable scale of her Privy Council (criticism of its size was first voiced by the Spanish ambassador to her court). Her counter-coup against Northumberland had been managed by a cabal of East Anglian gentry of distinctly Catholic sympathies. Northumberland, for a few days, had retained the support of the nobles and professional administrators of Edward VI’s council. However, as these men sensed the direction of events, they slipped quietly away, and were welcomed, wisely enough with open arms, into Mary’s camp. Once she had reached London, she had little choice but to leave most of these experienced royal servants in those political offices whose weight they had, however tardily, thrown into the balance on her side. To have dismissed them would have meant immediate administrative chaos and ultimate political disaster. The last thing she needed was a potential opposition party consisting of some of the most able and powerful politicians in the kingdom. Her East Anglian retinue, brimming over with goodwill and inexperience, could hardly be intruded en masse into the administrative heart of the Tudor state at a time of financial crisis. On the other hand, their claims upon Mary’s favour were even more pressing than those of Northumberland’s former if unwilling allies, and they predictably enough moved swiftly into the household offices which entailed personal attendance on the queen. Those whom she admitted to the council in fact proved capable enough men. Both groups were represented on her Privy Council, joined by a handful of other weighty figures, such as Gardiner and Tunstall (restored respectively as bishops of Winchester and Durham), who had spent much of the previous reign in custody. In practice, Mary’s council was dominated by the old Tudor hands like Gardiner, Paget, Winchester and Bedford, the lasting legacy of Henry VIII’s nose for talent.
Some have seen in the scale of Mary’s council an infallible recipe for faction and division, yet in fact the whole issue of scale is something of a red herring. As in the reign of her grandfather, the title of councillor was often merely honorific, a sop to the noble and influential. Most Privy Council sessions had between eight and a dozen men present, a perfectly manageable number. Faction there was, at times, yet it was not a matter of numbers but of personal rivalry (between Gardiner and Paget) and genuine disagreement over policy. Her decision to marry Philip complicated her problems considerably - not only because opinion on the marriage was divided, but also because, when Philip was in the country, he became an alternative focus for political activity. For example, when William Paget found himself out of favour with Mary early in 1555, he turned his attention to briefing Philip. But a degree of faction was probably unavoidable under the circumstances of the 1550s, amidst uncertainty over the succession and deepening religious division. Even under the strongest kings, the heir to the throne is likely to attract in one way or another the support or at least the interest of a group looking to the future. As long as Mary, already middle-aged, remained without a child, and the heir presumptive to the throne was her younger sister Elizabeth, it was inevitable that a portion of the political nation, especially that portion more sympathetic to religious reform, would look to the daughter of Anne Boleyn rather than to the daughter of Catherine of Aragon. On one or two well-publicised occasions, conciliar divisions spilled over into Parliament, to the embarrassment of the queen. Yet it is hardly fair to regard these as any more of an indictment of government than the ill-concealed rows in the next reign over Elizabeth’s relationship with Robert Dudley or her long courtship with the Duke of Anjou. If Elizabeth’s reign had ended in 1569, then historians would probably, if unfairly, also characterise her council as plagued by faction. Mary mostly got what she wanted. There is no evidence that her government was crippled by faction.
The real problem with Mary’s regime was neither the scale of her Privy Council nor the innate competitiveness of her councillors. It was her failure to identify a chief minister in the mould of Wolsey, Cromwell or Burghley: perhaps, at a deeper level, her failure to see the need for one. If there was a single political development of the era with lasting historical significance, it was the emergence of the chief minister, of a full-time professional to co-ordinate the increasingly burdensome paperwork of power. Occasionally monarchs such as Philip II or Louis XIV might cast themselves in this role, but most of them had neither the talent nor the inclination for it. There are some signs that Mary shared her husband’s taste for getting to grips with the paperwork. But there are no signs that she had the sort of grip on events and understanding of politics necessary to make sense of it. The most successful Tudors, Henry VIII and Elizabeth, owed much of their success in government to their ability to pick men who could do that for them. Mary lacked that gift.
Yet Mary’s background and situation made it impossible for her to select a chief minister in the way that her father had done. The field was inevitably restricted to those with talent and experience, most of whom were already in her government. And with none of these men could she ever enjoy that degree of trust essential to the relationship between monarch and chief minister. For they had all been compromised by service to her father or her brother. If they had not played a leading part in destroying the world of her childhood in the 1530s, tainting her mother with incest and her with bastardy, then they had browbeaten her over religion around 1550. Several had done both. She might appreciate political realities enough to understand that she could never govern without these men, the Gardiners, Pagets and Paulets. But she never liked them. During her disputes over religion under Edward, she had repeatedly and scornfully reminded them that they had been created out of political nothingness by her father, and she shared enough of the prejudices of the old nobility to think rather little of men who had clawed their way up the greasy pole. The two men she did trust, King Philip and Cardinal Pole, though both talented, could never fit the bill. Neither the foreigner nor the exile had the close ties among the English political elite vital to success in such a role. Besides this, Philip was mostly out of the country, while Pole was too idealistic and unworldly to act effectively as a chief minister, and in any case had no desire to do so.
World History
