The Reign of Mary I

Robert Tittler, Judith Richards

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317861676
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia britannica

Until recently, the reign of Mary Tudor was generally seen as a 'sterile interlude' in the Tudor century, with Mary herself dismissed as 'Bloody Mary'. Extensive research in the past several decades has overturned these assumptions in almost every respect. In this succinct and up-to-date introduction to Mary's reign, Tittler and Richards provide new insight into the circumstances of Mary's accession and go on to show that her reign was a lot more stable, and her regime much more competent and innovative, than once believed.

This fully revised third edition includes a diverse range of primary sources and sheds new light on a variety of topics, such as:

· The complexities of Mary's relations with Philip of Spain

· The restoration of Catholicism

· The use of visual as well as literary means to legitimize and support Mary's rule

· The context for the war with France

This concise and thought-provoking introduction is ideal for students and interested readers at all levels.

Part 1

BACKGROUND

1

The Apprenticeship of Mary Tudor

For a future monarch, Mary had a difficult start in life, and one which tells us a great deal about English politics in the first half of the sixteenth century. Born in February 1516, to Henry VIII and his first wife Katherine of Aragon, Mary was the heir apparent throughout her earliest years, and played the normal role of a young princess at court. She was as close to both her parents as the conventions of that age permitted. She received a firm classical education, learned to play upon the virginals, and faced the prospect of betrothal to scions of sundry ruling houses of Europe. Yet the longer her father’s desire for a male heir remained unfulfilled, the more dissatisfied he became with his marriage, and the golden days of Mary’s childhood were soon over. In 1525 Henry even briefly considered giving precedence in the succession to his illegitimate son, Henry Fitzroy. It was Mary who was sent to Ludlow Castle, where previous princes of Wales had been prepared to reign and, although she was never formally given the title, she was sometimes referred to as Princess of Wales. But as her father’s concern for a male heir grew, and his attraction to Anne Boleyn intensified, the validity of her parents’ marriage increasingly came under question, at least in Henry’s mind.

In June 1527, in what was soon known as ‘The King’s Great Matter’, Henry’s efforts to rid himself of an unwanted wife became public knowledge, and with it began the most trying years of Mary’s life. Throughout the divorce proceedings Mary was effectively in limbo. Though still likely heir to the throne, she was more estranged from her father and her future remained uncertain. When the collapse of her parents’ marriage reached its climax in 1531 Henry forbade her further contact with her beloved mother. Two years later Henry married his pregnant mistress Anne Boleyn and declared illegal his previous marriage with Katherine.

In 1534, he also declared himself supreme head of the Church in England, as his final repudiation of papal authority, since the Pope did not annul Henry’s first marriage. Once Anne Boleyn’s child proved to be his second daughter, named Elizabeth, Mary endured a sequence of humiliating degradations. Already barred from further contact with Katherine and her Catholic entourage, she was stripped of her familiar companions, declared illegitimate and sent to live, in a subordinate position, in the household of her infant half-sister Elizabeth at Hatfield, Mary languished in both health and spirit. We read in ambassadors’ reports of these years about her persistent fears of poisoning, and frequent illnesses. Henry’s attitude to her, however, softened considerably after his third marriage (to Jane Seymour in 1536) but only after his elder daughter had made a sufficiently submissive acceptance of her own illegitimacy, and of her father’s new religious doctrines.

After the birth of Edward to Queen Jane in 1537 Mary could more easily relinquish her rightful place in the succession to the new male heir. Thereafter she was constantly required by her father to be at court, despite her tense relationship with Henry’s fifth wife Catherine Howard (August 1540–February 1542). She became a constant companion of Henry’s last wife, Catherine Parr, in Henry’s declining years. The two women shared many interests, among them paintings, and at Katherine’s instigation Mary undertook an English translation of Erasmus’ Paraphrases of the English Testament. In 1544 Mary was reinstated in the succession by parliamentary statute (35 Hen. VIII c. 1), being placed between Edward and Anne Boleyn’s daughter Elizabeth (see Genealogies, Table I). Henry’s final will, made shortly before his death in 1547, confirmed this arrangement.

When Henry died, both Mary and Catherine Parr were discussed as likely regent for the young Edward VI, but during the three days that Henry’s death was kept secret, Edward Seymour and other royal councillors organised an effective coup, with Seymour as Edward’s Lord Protector. Mary was then not quite 31 years old, but had been awarded extensive land holdings and the use of rich hangings and other adornments by the new regime (McIntosh, 2008). Throughout Edward’s reign she enjoyed substantial estates, a full retinue, and at least some of the respect due to her as a princess: she also experienced a comfortable material situation as a major landowner in East Anglia. Despite her affection for Edward, she wisely paid few visits to the royal court, not least because of Seymour’s sponsorship of a Protestantism much more radical than that of Henry VIII. Above all, for Mary, his abolition of the Catholic mass, which Henry had always insisted on retaining, was intolerable. A draft letter survives of her fury at the religious innovations introduced by Edward’s uncle Seymour, now the Duke of Somerset and Lord Protector of the Realm. In the privacy of her own household, Mary and her attendants were at first permitted to hold mass in the Catholic rite, and she became more than ever the symbol of traditional Catholic practice in a legally Protestant England. The Emperor Charles V, her Habsburg cousin, staunchly defended her right to maintain this privilege, and numerous well-born English Catholics held no greater ambition than to serve her. Moreover, she maintained her practice, when she did attend the court in London, of having her entourage all richly dressed and each wearing rosary beads. No one in London could have doubted her continuing allegiance to the ‘old’ religion. (This was not her only spirited challenge to Seymour’s authority. She also wrote sharply in 1547 to oppose his plan to marry Catherine Parr, her father’s last wife.) [Doc. 1]

After John Dudley, Earl of Warwick and shortly to become Duke of Northumberland, succeeded Somerset as the effective ruler of England in 1550, Mary’s situation deteriorated considerably. He was a much more staunch and intolerant Protestant: one who saw Mary as the Habsburg foot in the English door, recognised her potential role as the leader of English Catholicism, and determined his policy accordingly. Before long Mary fought and ultimately lost a painful battle to keep the Catholic rite alive in her own household. At the peak of her subsequent distress she considered flight to Spain, demurring at the last moment even as a Spanish ship waited for her off the coast at Maldon in Essex.

On the eve of her succession, Mary Tudor was 37 and still unmarried, but unusually well equipped to face the struggles which were about to take place. Having been granted much of the property of the Dukes of Norfolk, she had assumed the role of a regional magnate, had several years’ experience in managing an unusually large household and had a ready-made political centre with a significant regional affinity to support her. Although in 1552, her relations were less cordial with the young and fervently Protestant King Edward, who had previously chosen to hector her about her religious beliefs, her last visit to Edward’s court in January 1553 saw an unusually warm reception for her. Even Spanish observers were gratified by the splendour of her reception, and the honour apparently paid her. Between her brother the king, his court and herself, it appeared that all was as well as it had ever been since Edward had come to the throne.

Further reading

Scarisbrick, J. J. (1971) Henry VIII, London: Eyre and Spottiswoode.

2

The Condition of England

As the Princess Mary awaited her fate, the realm which she hoped to govern lay in the midst of profound economic and social changes, spanning the processes of manufacturing, commerce, and agricultural productivity and even the very size and structure of the English population.

The commercial backbone of England’s economy had long been based on three chief activities: foreign trade (in which raw wool and woollen cloth were far and away the main exports), regional trade and the local commerce of the market town or fair. Beyond the exaction of revenue from tolls and customs, the central government interfered remarkably little in these activities. By the mid-sixteenth century, some of the fundamental features of all three types of enterprise were undergoing rapid change.

After the period of marked prosperity earlier in the century the woollen cloth industry faced sudden instability due to the saturation of accustomed Continental markets. At the same time such traditional institutions as the guilds and even the chartered boroughs which acted to regulate economic activity came under heavy shelling from what we may now recognise as early capitalist free enterprise. In some areas, particularly in such older industrial cities as Coventry and York, manufacturers were moving out from the towns, where guild and corporate regulations were sometimes costly and oppressive, and into the countryside, where such regulations often did not exist (Palliser, 1979). In addition, the nature of some agricultural enterprises permitted husbandmen to start up ancillary manufacturing activities – especially in the textile trades – which also competed with the interests of the towns (Thirsk, 1961). The figure of the middleman, familiar in contemporary literature as the corn or wool ‘bodger’ (or sometimes ‘brogger’), facilitated economic specialisation and furthered this growth of free enterprise (Bowden, 1962).

Borough: A town or city with a charter allowing residents to hold land in a form called ‘burghal tenure’, which exempted them from most feudal obligations and permitted the inheritance of a property without fine or fee.

Guild: (1) A formal association of master craftsmen, manufacturers or merchants; and/or (2) a pre-Reformation, Roman Catholic religious fraternity.

In some areas the processing of foodstuffs and other consumer items had grown in scale, sometimes through technological innovations and sometimes through the expansion of credit mechanisms. Thus, for example, in the brewing industry the addition of hops to ale, resulting in true beer, allowed longer storage, wider distribution without spoilage and larger scale production. In many areas ale-making, which had been a part-time, village-level industry, was giving way to competition from full-time and large-scale beer producers in central urban locations, much as present-day small shops may fall victim to supermarkets or chain stores.

These patterns of economic change not only threatened traditional craftsmen, merchants and guilds, but cut to the heart of medieval, pre-capitalist assumptions about the nature and purpose of production, employment and sales. Those assumptions were based upon the belief that the entire village or town community was a harmonious whole, in which the welfare of all the parts had to be served. That goal could only be achieved by maintaining the quality of manufactured products, regulating prices and wages and restricting competition by enforcing a system of apprenticeship. Only those who had served in the time-honoured fashion were permitted to take their place among the master craftsmen or merchants. This system had been almost entirely self-regulating, with little interference from outside the community, much less from Westminster, considered either necessary or appropriate (Hoak, 1986).

Throughout the late medieval and early modern era the traditional forms of pre-capitalist enterprise were giving way to those of early capitalism. One of the most frequently cited reasons for this profoundly significant change is the renewed growth of population which many consider to have been under way for at least a decade or two before Mary came to the throne (Blanchard, 1970). This sustained population growth, probably first apparent in the countryside and small towns, stimulated consumer demand, drove up prices in the domestic market, and helped accelerate the rate of inflation. It had the additional effect of depressing wage rates and helping to create a reservoir of cheap and mobile labour, unwilling to serve lengthy apprenticeships before joining the work force. It also encouraged the poverty and vagrancy which threatened social stability and became a major concern of the Tudor state (Slack, 1988).

Taken together, these developments provided sharp growing pains for Tudor society, considerable instability for its economy, and a substantial challenge for its governors. The devaluation of the coinage begun by Henry VIII and resumed even more drastically under Edward VI, made the situation increasingly serious without doing as much to stimulate foreign trade as was once thought. Both towns and countryside were profoundly affected by the changes that were taking place. Many towns faced new economic and political challenges from the rising costs of repairing public works and replacing social institutions formerly run by the Catholic Church, and from the rapidly growing numbers of indigent workers and migrants in their midst (Tittler, 1977).

The countryside had to deal with the additional problem of what to grow and how to sell it. During the fifteenth century England experienced decades of expansion in the cloth industry without sustained increase of population; indeed, there were even occasional shortages of labour. Under these conditions the conversion of arable lands to pasture, often by process of enclosure, seemed to many a logical course. When cloth exports faltered in the late 1540s and early 1550s, a time of renewed population pressure and greater availability of labour, some farmers were encouraged to return pasture land to tillage. Others may have turned from raising sheep to raising cattle on the same pasture land, reacting to a probable rise in demand for beef. Still others turned to rural industries to supplement their earnings from agriculture. These conditions were not unique to Mary’s reign, but they were characteristic of it.

Enclosure: The practice of converting common lands (and common access to those lands), into privately held plots accessible to their holder, usually by the erection of a fence, wall or other boundary.

Ironically, one of the most dramatic social and economic factors of the time – and one which was not particularly characteristic of the rest of the century – may temporarily have relieved some of the population pressure at work in the mid-century, though it created serious problems of its own. Two successive harvest failures in 1555 and 1556 and epidemics of typhus and influenza between 1556 and 1558 combined to produce in Mary’s reign the most intense demographic disaster of the century – only rivalled, if at all, by the plague and harvest failures of the 1590s. The mortality in these years has been estimated at one and a half times the normal rate (Fisher, 1965: 127), while there is evidence of twice as many burials as usual in some four hundred parishes between 1557 and 1559.

As might be expected, this crisis seems especially to have hit the very old and the very young. Geographically, mortality was much higher in the towns, where greater congestion and poorer sanitation provided conditions in which disease spread rapidly. Typical of many was the borough of Tamworth, Staffordshire, where deaths averaged about 40 a year throughout the century, but where 95 people were buried between March and December 1557.

Thus, while all sixteenth- (and especially mid-sixteenth) century English governments faced profound economic and social changes, Mary’s regime would face additional serious problems, not of her own making, but unique in degree to her reign.

Further reading

Jones, W. R. D. (1973) The Mid-Tudor Crisis, 1539–1563, Basingstoke: Macmillan.

Part 2

ANALYSIS

3

The Accession of Mary Tudor

FLIGHT AND RALLY

The events which placed Mary on the throne in July 1553 have probably been debated as much as any episode in the history of the English royal successions. Some argue that they represent the only successful English revolt of the entire century, others that the attempt by an underage king to overthrow solely on his own authority a decision made by his royal father and confirmed by Parliament was never legally enforceable. (See the 1544 Henrician Act of Succession.)

In 1553 the health of the young King Edward VI began to deteriorate. Even before that, however, he had begun work on altering Henry VIII’s line of succession, while still anticipating many years of his own reign. For many years it was believed that Edward’s changes to Henry’s succession settlement were actually the work of the Duke of Northumberland. More recently, however, a powerful argument has been mounted against that view (Loades, 1996). More recent research demonstrates that the Duke of Northumberland, still effective ruler of the kingdom, had arranged a marriage in May between Lady Jane Grey and his son Guildford, but that this took place only after an earlier marriage proposed for Guildford with another heiress had failed. Edward, however, had probably begun drafting his preferred line of succession sometim...