THE REIGN _of_ MARY TUDOR
_by_
JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE
LONDON: PUBLISHED
by J. M. DENT & SONS Ltd
AND IN NEW YORK
BY E. P. DUTTON & CO
{p.vii} INTRODUCTION
The memory of no English sovereign has been so execrated as that of
Mary Tudor. For generations after her death her name, with its horrid
epithet clinging round it like the shirt of Nessus, was a bugbear in
thousands of Protestant homes. It is true that nearly 300 persons were
burnt at the stake in her short reign. But she herself was more
inclined to mercy than almost any of her predecessors on the throne.
Stubbs speaks of her father's "holocausts" of victims. The persecution
of Papists under Edward was not less rigorous than that of Protestants
under Mary. When her record is compared with that of Philip of Spain,
with his Council of Blood in the Netherlands, or of Charles IX. in
France, she appears as an apostle of toleration. Why, then, has her
memory been covered through centuries with scorn and obloquy?
Froude will have it that it was due to a national detestation of the
crimes which were committed in the name of religion. Those who take a
more detached view of history can find little evidence to support the
assumption. The nation as a whole seemed to acquiesce in the
persecution. The government was weak, there was no standing army, and
Mary, like all the Tudors, rested her authority on popular sanction.
Plots against her were few, and they were all easily suppressed.
Parliament met regularly. It was not the submissive parliament of
Henry VIII. It thwarted some of Mary's dearest projects. For some time
it offered opposition to, if it did not actively resist, the Spanish
marriage. It was inexorably opposed to the restitution of church
property. It refused to alter the succession to the Crown as Mary
wished. But it never remonstrated against the persecution of
Protestants. It cheerfully revived the old acts for the burning of
Lollard heretics. Froude suggests that Englishmen were aghast at the
use to which they were afterwards put. But though parliament after
parliament was summoned after the Smithfield fires had been lit, there
was no sign of disapproval or of condemnation. When Edward died, there
was an instantaneous return to Catholicism. When Mary died, Elizabeth
{p.viii} had to walk warily in bringing about innovations in
religion. Mary was crowned with the ceremonies of the Catholic Church.
When Elizabeth was crowned, nearly all the bishops, including the
"bloody" Bonner, attended, and the service of the mass was used.
Harpsfield, the notorious Archdeacon of Canterbury, the last man to
condemn heretics to the stake in England, publicly stated, weeks after
the accession of Elizabeth, that there should be no change in
religion. Later generations, judging events and characters by their
own standard, have pitilessly condemned the Marian persecutions. The
Englishmen of those days were not so squeamish or so indifferent.
There can be no doubt that Mary was unpopular among her own
contemporaries. Two reasons probably account for it. The first was her
marriage with Philip of Spain. There is no nation in Europe which has
shown itself more tolerant of alien sovereigns than the English. They
submitted to William of Normandy almost without a struggle after
Senlac. They adopted the Plantagenet as their national line of kings.
The Tudors were Welsh; the Stuarts Scotch; William III. was a
Dutchman; the Hanoverian dynasty was German. But though tolerant of
foreign dynasties, the English have, since the days of John, been
excessively jealous of foreign influences. One of the main causes of
Henry III.'s unpopularity was the overweening influence of his foreign
favourites. From Edward I. downwards the Plantagenets ruled as English
sovereigns. Henry VII., though he was crowned on the field of battle
and claimed the throne by right of conquest, was too discreet to
maintain his power, as Mary was once tempted to do, by the aid of
Welsh guards. The fiercest hostility was evoked by James I., William
III., and the first two Georges, because they surrounded themselves
with favourites from their own countries. Foreigners might sit on the
throne of England, but they had to rule as English sovereigns and rest
their power on the support of the English people. This intense
national jealousy was unhappily aroused by Mary. The strict
limitations which were placed on her husband's powers should have
warned her of her danger. Philip was allowed the empty title of king,
but from the realities of power he was studiously excluded. Philip was
careful to maintain the spirit as well as the letter of his
obligations. He made no attempt to encroach upon the sovereignty of
Mary. He advised her, as it was his duty to do, but he did not
interfere with the government of the country. No {p.ix} Spanish
troops were landed in England, even when war had broken out with
France, and the coasts of England were unguarded. Yet the morbid
suspicions of the people were not allayed. The Dudley plot and the
Stafford invasion were justified by their authors, not on the ground
of Mary's bloody persecutions, but because it was feared that Philip
was planning a _coup d'etat_. Mary's popularity began to wane with her
marriage; it sunk lower and lower till it almost disappeared when
England was dragged into a war with France in the interests of Spain.
St. Quintin and Gravelines for a time roused a feeble enthusiasm for
the war, but the loss of Calais finally extinguished the Queens
popularity. Mary is reported to have said that if her body were opened
Calais would be found written on her heart. Froude disbelieves the
report. But whether the story be apocryphal or not, there is no doubt
that the loss of Calais was accountable, if not for the death of the
Queen, for the permanent destruction of her fame.
Calais was called the "brightest jewel in the English crown." It was
the last relic of the French possessions of the Plantagenets. It was
the Gibraltar of the sixteenth century. It helped to make of the
narrow seas an English channel. It was a mart for English goods. It
afforded a foothold for Continental enterprises. To some extent it
linked England with her traditional allies, the old Burgundian
possessions in the Netherlands. By us, looking back over the chequered
story of the last three centuries, the loss of Calais is seen to have
been a blessing in disguise. England gained by it as she did by the
loss of Normandy under John, and of Hanover at the accession of Queen
Victoria. But to Mary's subjects it was a corroding humiliation.
"If Spain should rise suddenly into her ancient strength," Froude
truly remarks, "and tear Gibraltar from us, our mortification would be
faint, compared to the anguish of humiliated pride with which the loss
of Calais distracted the subjects of Mary."
It was the galling reflection that Calais was lost to the French in a
Spanish quarrel that crowned the poor Queen's obloquy. She had lost it
through wanton neglect. Had the warnings of Wentworth and Grey been
heeded, Calais might have been saved. Calais need never have been
imperilled had the Queen thought more of English interests and less of
the needs of her Spanish husband.
{p.x} The odium in which Mary's memory was held was turned to account
by the friends of the new religion. Early in the next reign there
appeared one of the most remarkable books ever written--Foxe's _Book
of Martyrs_. The authenticity of its narrative has been impugned by
Lingard and other Catholic historians; Froude bears testimony to its
trustworthiness wherever it can be tested, except when it deals with
purely hearsay evidence. When Foxe's narrative of the horrible
Guernsey case was challenged by a Catholic controversialist in the
reign of Elizabeth, the matter was inquired into, and the account was
found to be absolutely true. No one will be found, however, in these
days to assert that a book, written by an avowed partisan, in an
uncritical age, recording transactions of which from the very nature
of things he could have had no personal knowledge, was not too highly
coloured in parts and in others absolutely untrustworthy. Few books,
nevertheless, have exercised a more abiding influence on the course of
our national life. Its simplicity, its directness, its poignant style,
and its dramatic power combined to make it an English classic. If it
loaded Bonner and Gardiner with shame and hatred, it fixed for three
centuries the popular estimate of Mary Tudor. Froude used it with
extraordinary skill. His relation of the death of a young Protestant
martyr, an apprentice from Essex, taken as it is almost bodily from
Foxe, must thrill even yet the least emotional of his readers. The
permanence of Mary's hideous title and her abiding unpopularity are
more due to the compelling power of a work of genius than to any
outstanding demerits, as judged by contemporary standards, in the
Catholic Queen.
Instead of being condemned to eternal infamy, poor Mary Tudor might
well have expected a juster as well as a more charitable verdict from
posterity. From her girlhood to her grave her story was tragic in its
sadness. When she was in the first bloom of maidenhood, she was taken
by her father to hold her Court of the Welsh Marches at Ludlow in
1525. The title of Princess of Wales was not conferred upon her, but
she was surrounded by all the pomps and emblems of sovereignty. The
Court was the Princess's Court, as it had been Prince Henry's Court in
her father's youth. Three years later she was degraded from her high
estate, and deprived of her Court. Henceforth, throughout her father's
reign, she was known as the Lady, not the Princess, Mary. She was old
{p.xi} enough to feel all the bitterness of her mother's tragedy.
She remembered to her dying day the humiliation of the Boleyn
marriage. She never ceased to resent the birth of her sister
Elizabeth. Her brother Edward was born in lawful wedlock after Queen
Catherine's death, and Mary was always perfectly loyal and obedient to
him as she was to her father. But she looked with cold disfavour,
mingled with morbid jealousy, on the budding promise of Elizabeth. Her
very existence was an insult to Mary's mother and a menace to Mary's
religion. If Elizabeth was legitimate, Catherine of Arragon was
rightly divorced, and Mary herself had no claim to the throne other
than by her father's will. Elizabeth could never be reconciled to Rome
without casting an aspersion on Anne Boleyn's honour.
No woman was ever more lonely or loveless than the ill-starred and
ill-favoured Queen Mary. She had no near relatives in England except
Elizabeth, and Elizabeth, by the irony of fate, was worse than a
stranger to her. The awful solitude of a throne excluded her, even
more than her own ill-health and brooding temper, from the joys of
friendship. Philip of Spain was at once her nearest relation on her
mother's side, and the only man she ever confided in except Cardinal
Pole. She lavished all the pent-up affection of an unloved existence
on her husband. She was repaid by cold neglect, studied indifference,
and open and vulgar infidelity. Philip made no pretence to care for
his wife. She was older in years, she was ungainly in person, she
possessed no charm of manner or grace of speech, her very voice was
the deep bass of a man. In the days of her joyous entrance into
London, amid the acclamations of the populace, her high spirit, her
kind heart, and the excitement of adventure lent a passing glow to her
sallow cheeks. But ill-health and disillusion followed. She became
morbid and sullen, sometimes remaining for days in a dull stupor, at
other times giving way to gusts of hysterical passion. But beneath her
forbidding exterior there beat a warm, tender, womanly heart, which
yearned for some one to love and to cherish. Her mother had died when
she was yet young, her father never encouraged her to display her
affection for him, and she was verging on middle age before she saw
Philip. He became her hero, her master. Wifely obedience became to her
the greatest of virtues; she held herself and England at his service.
She longed for a son who would bind her husband more closely to
herself and who {p.xii} would save England from the hated Elizabeth,
and still more from Elizabeth's hated religion. When old and ill, and
on the brink of the grave, she still cherished the vain dream of
giving birth to the saviour of England and the champion of the faith.
But Froude dwells with malicious irony on the frustration of the poor
woman's hopes. He covers the incident with a ridicule which must jar
on all sensitive minds. The fact that Cardinal Pole encouraged her
belief adds zest to Froude's satisfaction. No purer soul ever set
himself to right the world than Reginald Pole; no one failed more
completely in his cherished plans. He and Mary died on the same day;
the bells that tolled their knell rang out the order for which they
stood. But the utter failure of their hopes roused no emotion save
that of bitter contempt in Froude. He saw no merit in the "hysterical
dreamer" who had sacrificed his all for his religion; he saw no pathos
in the life of that lone woman who was condemned, almost from her
cradle, to a loveless existence and a forlorn death. His final epitaph
on her is that "she had reigned little more than five years, and she
descended into the grave amidst curses deeper than the acclamations
which had welcomed her accession." The only excuse he can find for her
is that she was suffering from "hysterical derangement" akin to
insanity, which placed her absolutely under the domination of Gardiner
and Pole. When we remember her magnanimity towards Lady Jane Grey at
her accession, when we contrast her conduct towards the formidable
Elizabeth with Elizabeth's subsequent conduct towards Mary Queen of
Scots, her generosity to the causes she had at heart with Elizabeth's
unfailing parsimony, and her open and straightforward dealings both in
matters of Church and of State with her sister's mean and tortuous
subterfuges, we may well extend not only our pity to the woman, but
some tribute of admiration to the Queen. At least we may agree with
Froude that "few men or women have lived less capable of doing
knowingly a wrong thing."
W. LLEWELYN WILLIAMS.
_February 3, 1910._
{p.xiii} Bibliography