If one single action of Mary’s deserves the criticism which is usually heaped upon her reign, it must be her marriage to Philip of Spain. In both personal and political terms it was a disaster, although it is not clear that Mary herself realised this until the bitter end (and it was bitter indeed) - which may be a sufficient commentary on her personal and political failings. The sixteenth century, as we have frequently been reminded in recent years, was a patriarchal age. It was expected that wealthy, wellborn women would marry, and there was no reason why Mary should not conform to that expectation. Indeed, to the extent that she had been educated for any role in life, it was for marriage to a foreign prince.
Mary’s education had of course been wider than that of most women of her time. Her mother had commissioned one of the leading Spanish scholars of the day, Juan Luis Vives, to design a programme of education specifically for her. The result was The Education of a Christian Woman (1524), which recommended not only the traditional female accomplishments of spinning and needlework, but a humanist academic programme of grammar and rhetoric. Mary was not to be hampered in her studies, as her great-grandmother Lady Margaret Beaufort had been, by ignorance of Latin. To some extent, she should be seen as the first in a line of Tudor bluestockings which included her younger sister Elizabeth and her cousin Jane Grey, although she was not their equal in learning (Elizabeth read Latin and Greek fluently, and even translated the classics for pleasure). Mary could speak French, Spanish and Latin, and could follow Italian. She could ride; she could sing; she could even play the lute and the keyboard. She was, of course, prodigiously devout in a conventional way. Although she read, and even translated, some Erasmus, there is no indication at all that she had any sympathy with the kind of criticism of the Church which by this time his very name stood for. Her patience in adversity, which she had ample occasion to exercise, suggests that she would have been inured to witnessing the serial infidelities that were almost expected of a royal husband. Had her life been happier, she might long before have left her native shores to bear the children of some Habsburg or Valois prince, living the sort of life outlined for her in another little tract commissioned by her mother, Erasmus’s Introduction to Christian Marriage. As it was, the tortuous political manoeuvres of her father’s reign had denied her the opportunities that had come her way. But, having secured the throne, there was apparently nothing to prevent her from fulfilling what she doubtless regarded as her maternal destiny: nothing, that is, except age and ill health.
For it is not necessary to descend into the murky underworld of psychohistory to conjecture that her experience as a teenager, when her father brutally rejected her along with her mother, combined with the unaccustomed hardships of life under virtual house arrest with her mother in the early 1530s, might have disturbed her sexual development as well as damaged her physical health. By the time Mary was in a position to find herself a husband, she was over thirty-seven years old, which even today would be considered a little risky for a first pregnancy. It was extremely late by sixteenth-century standards, and while it was not unknown for women to continue bearing children into their early forties, in her case the medical evidence is far from clear that she was still capable of conceiving. The immediate family precedents were not good. Her own mother’s pregnancies had miscarried more often than not, with the last of them occurring in 1518, when she was only thirty-two.
In choosing a husband, Mary was in an unprecedented and unenviable dilemma, as her husband would necessarily become king. To marry an Englishman, however noble, would be to marry a subject and raise him to the throne, indeed to an eminence greater than her own. Yet to marry a foreigner would mean making a foreigner king. Neither option was ideal. It was one thing for a king to take a subject as a wife. This involved no disturbance to the social order, although, as was seen under Henry VIII, the political implications for the bride’s family could be huge. The king’s wife had no power, though she might exert influence. For a queen to take a subject as a husband was a different matter, as it would to a greater or lesser extent transfer power from her hands to his. And this is not to mention the affront both to Tudor pride (which ran undiluted in Mary’s veins) and to national esteem in marrying beneath her own and her realm’s dignity. Again, it was one thing for a king to marry a foreign princess, quite another for a queen to marry a foreign prince. A prince in line for (or already upon) a foreign throne might simply subordinate the interests of England to those of an international dynasty, while a younger son would no doubt regard the marriage as the opportunity to fulfil the political ambitions from which only the smallest accident of birth had separated him.
It is hardly surprising that Mary’s Privy Council divided sharply over this novel problem, with the Lord Chancellor, Gardiner, preferring the domestic option, and William Paget urging a foreign marriage. The dispute spilled over into Parliament in November 1553. When the Speaker of the House of Commons led a delegation to lobby the queen against marrying abroad, the dilemma was laid out unmistakably. The Commons could not bear the thought of a foreign sovereign. But their suggestion that Mary marry a subject enraged her so much that she trampled on convention by answering for herself, instead of allowing the Lord Chancellor to answer for her. Haughtily intimating that royal marriages were a matter for the royal prerogative rather than for parliamentary debate, she dismissed their intervention as an impertinence. Her outburst may have been more calculated than it appeared, for later she gave a dressing-down to Gardiner, whom she suspected, not wholly without reason, of having briefed the Speaker of the House of Commons in advance of this meeting.
In the circumstances, a foreign prince was probably preferable to an English noble - for the only plausible domestic candidate was the inexperienced and unstable young Edward Courtenay, Earl of Devon, who had spent most of his life thus far in the Tower of London. At least a foreigner, as an outsider, brought a new element into the system rather than merely strengthening one part of it, and a prince of royal blood necessarily stood above aristocratic rivalries as a home-grown nobleman never could. It was one of the more unaccountable acts of the varied career of Bishop Stephen Gardiner that at this moment, when he was on the brink of supreme power under the queen, he urged the cause of Courtenay in the teeth of Mary’s clear preference for a foreign husband.
When it came to bringing these general considerations down to the arena of political practicalities, Philip of Spain, in his late twenties yet already a widower, looked an excellent choice. The marriage would seal the traditional anti-French alliance between England and the Burgundian and Castilian dynasties that were united in his person. In itself the marriage summed up Mary’s ‘good old days’ policy, for it represented a return to an alliance which, except at a few moments of crisis, had served England well since the time of Henry V. Mary’s own sympathies lay firmly with the Habsburgs, who had shown themselves her friends, at times her only friends, throughout the 1530s and the 1540s. Finally, as in due course Philip would become fully occupied with his dominions abroad, he was likely to be a less destabilising influence on English politics than a foreign prince seeking to put down roots here.
Plan of the Charing Cross area from the ‘Ralph Agas’ map. After a brief skirmish at Charing Cross, Sir Thomas Wyatt’s troops headed east along the Strand and Fleet Street on Ash Wednesday (7 February) 1554, only to find the gates of the city of London barred against them at Ludgate.
Even when the queen’s choice was made, and the council merely had to implement her decision, there was still much to be done, chiefly to frame the marriage treaty in order to protect English interests as far as possible against the risk of subordination to those of a foreign power. In so far as this could be done by treaty, it was done well. Strict limits were placed on Philip’s intrinsic powers as king consort, and, in the absence of children, his powers would lapse with Mary’s death. But there was nothing anyone could do to prevent Mary, should she see fit, from following her husband’s policy advice. Everyone assumed that he would make a very real contribution by virtue of what was at the time viewed as the innate superiority of men over women and the legal and moral authority of husbands over wives.
World History
