Read Tudor Queenship: The Reigns of Mary and Elizabeth Online
Authors: Alice Hunt,Anna Whitelock
Tags: #Royalty, #Tudors, #England/Great Britain, #Nonfiction, #Biography & Autobiography
CHAPTER 10
POWER SHARING: THE CO-MONARCHY OF PHILIP AND MARY
Alexander Samson
I
Writing on Philip and Mary’s power-sharing arrangements has been overshadowed by the negative reputations enjoyed by both monarchs: the Habsburg prince’s image rooted in the Black Legend and that of the first English queen regnant unfavorably compared to her successor’s and embodied in her epithets of bloody and tragic.
1
Women’s exercise of royal authority and involvement in a number of different forms of governance were predictable and co-monarchy less uncommon than might first appear. Early modern European governance needs to be understood not only through documentary remains but also in terms of material culture. The historiographical tendency to view the marriage of Philip and Mary negatively needs to be offset by consideration of factors such as the display of courtly magnificence, an area where their marriage enjoyed considerable success.
Their entries, entertainments, luxurious clothing, priceless jewels, gifts as well as conjoined arms and style were disseminated globally, from a church dedicated to the pair in Argentina in 1555, to the 1557 stained glass window of them in Gouda commemorating San Quentin. Their joint arms are also found above the Via Maggiore in Milan, symbol of an offensive alliance holding back the French tide in Italy.
2
Indirect forms of influence and favor can help us understand in a more nuanced way how royal government translated into political action. The idea that Philip’s power was compromised by the absence of a personal patrimony in England ignores, firstly, the fact that he had one of the largest pools of personal patrimony from which to draw in western Europe and distributed gifts and pensions that continued to be paid to some Englishmen almost to the end of Elizabeth’s reign. Secondly, it has recently been persuasively argued that in the Spanish royal government of the period “clientage was an ineffective administrative tool.”
3
Our relatively poor understanding of Marian government reflects to some extent the invisibility of high politics in documentary terms under a queen regnant—an invisibility that may be more characteristic of the modus operandi of queen consorts, whose influence operated in more informal, less public ways, and through signs of favor, intercession, endowments, and gift-giving. Although we know that Mary apparently applied herself assiduously to matters of state, co-monarchies hover between the personal and the political, the conspicuous and the invisible, the familial and the international. An instructive comparison is Philip IV’s favorite the duke of Lerma, who bequeathed very little documentary evidence as a political actor—not as a symptom of disengagement but of astuteness. It allowed him to disavow creatures and clients when policies proved unpopular, failed, or fell afoul of royal disapproval.
4
A study of the working of the Marian court waits to be written. This essay seeks to uncover how Philip might have been seen at the time, flesh out a fuller context for understanding his and Mary’s co-monarchy in relation to Spanish precedents, and argue that, given its circumstances, their co-monarchy was a qualified success.
II
Early modern monarchies were ruled neither by one person nor by a political structure. Instead they consisted of dominant kinship groups forging themselves into dynasties at whose central axis lay the politics of marital alliances, crucially between king and queen. The corporatist nature of monarchy meant that a range of different power-sharing arrangements was common. Most typical, though, was a contract between king, grandees, and urban elites. This “corporation character”
5
underpinned the queen regents’ political authority, which was an extension of their maternal rights as guardians of their (normally) male children, especially when many leading courtiers were also close kin. The distinctive nature of Spanish queenship made royal women in the Iberian peninsula far more likely to participate actively in the governance of the realm than their northern counterparts, effectively forming “political partnerships” with their husbands.
6
Close dynastic ties between the kingdoms of the Iberian peninsula, as well as the ongoing struggle of the
Reconquista
had led to frequent female regencies and pregnancies in premier Iberia.
7
In Aragón, although women were barred from inheriting the crown, some seven queen consorts governed for varying lengths of time between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
8
Testamentary succession—that vexed question that at the beginning of Mary I’s reign provoked John Ponet to ask in his
A
Shorte Treatise of Politike Power
, “[H]ow is the Lady Mary Queen? And why might not King Edward...bequeath the Crown where he would, and as he did?”—was common in medieval Iberia, which was one reason why it was possible, and even probable, for queens to inherit and rule in their own right.
9
The English opposition to the Spanish match on the eve of the Wyatt rebellion in January 1554 seems to have ignored such reassuring precedents of female sovereign independence and active participation in government. Other familiar contemporary regencies, such as those of Charles V’s sister Mary of Hungary and Philip II’s recently widowed sister Juana, also went unheeded. Mary’s most obvious role model, however, as for her mother Catherine of Aragon, was her grandmother Isabel of Castile, who had ruled much of Spain in her own right for three decades, despite marrying Ferdinand V of Aragon in 1469. Ferdinand’s irritation when Isabel declared herself queen and had herself crowned in his absence in Segovia in 1474 was mollified to some extent by a subsequent agreement about their representational equality and his precedence in their joint style (identical to the case of Philip and Mary).
Like Philip and Mary and many other dynasts, Ferdinand and Isabel required a dispensation to marry because of their consanguinity.
10
After fraught negotiations between the two camps, the document was drawn up in 1475 by Pedro Gónzalez de Mendoza and Alonso Carrillo, Archbishop of Toledo. The “Concordia entre los señores Reyes Catolicos D. Fernando, y Doña Isabel” asserted that “the style on letters patent, proclamations and the coinage, on seals shall be common to both the said lords, king and queen, being present or absent; but the name of the said king’s name shall take precedence although the arms of Castile and León shall go before those of Sicily and Aragon.”
11
The compromise was that while his name preceded hers, the royal arms of Castile came first. Of course, the government of the Catholic monarchs effectively began only at the back-end of civil war, with the death of Isabel’s brother Henry IV in 1474 and the eventual defeat of the rival claimant Juana la Beltraneja, supported by Alfonso V of Portugal, at the battle of Toro in 1476. Although Ferdinand and the Aragonese party managed to secure some concessions after their arrival in Segovia, ultimately Isabel remained sole proprietary ruler and Ferdinand enjoyed limited powers in the Castilian kingdoms. Murmurings about a sword being borne before Isabel at her accession,
12
as a symbol inappropriate for a woman, were echoed nearly a century later by malcontents such as John Colwyn, a Cornishman who in the winter of 1553 was arrested for suggesting that “We ought not to have a woman to bear the sword.”
13
Similarly Protestant exiles in anti-Marian propaganda, such as one anonymous pamphleteer in 1555, asked “whether the expres word of god in the xxii chap. of Deut. forbyd a woman to beare a sworde, or weare spurs, as kyngs do in theyr creacion, or to weare any other weapon, or apparell of man.”
14
Indeed, girding with the sword and putting-on of spurs were precisely what had occurred at Mary’s coronation.
The
capitulación
signed before their marriage, like Philip and Mary’s contract, had circumscribed Ferdinand’s kingly authority with numerous clauses limiting his freedom of action in kingdoms ruled over by his wife, particularly the disposing of personal patronage there. Ferdinand had agreed:
ITEM that we will go personally to those kingdoms to reside and be in them with the said most serene princess, and that we will not leave or depart from them without her will and counsel and we will not carry her out of the said kingdoms without her consent and wish.
ITEM what God granting us some issue whether male or female, one should expect no less, that we will never take them away from her or carry them out of the kingdom...
ITEM that we will not alienate nor grant any privilege to any city, town or fortress, whether by grant of rights nor any other thing whatsoever belonging to the Crown, without the consent and advice of the said princess...
ITEM that in all the privileges, letters and whatever other writings that must be set down, be done and sent either by her or by us, they must be signed together and signed in such a way that they carry signatures in the hand both of the two of us, and that the style of those kingdoms and lordships pertaining to her and us must be jointly styled...
ITEM that we will not place any in the council of those kingdoms except Castilians and natural born subjects without the consent and determined deliberation of the said serene princess...
ITEM that we will not give the stewardship of any fortress in those kingdoms to any save those that are natural born...15
The commitment to admit only natural born subjects and not foreigners to any office in Castile was repeated twice, “place whatsoever officials, except that those who must be placed in that office be natural born and not strangers chosen from them,” along with the condition that if no progeny resulted from the marriage “that Isabel may possess and hold them except when after her days all those lands as much those annexed as those improved as all others may return to us and our heirs to whom by right they belong.”
16
Mary’s aunt Juana, the queen unfortunately dubbed “the Mad,” succeeded her mother as queen and not Ferdinand, the husband and co-ruler since 1474. She ruled in her own right nominally for a brief period of five years, before slowly being deprived of political authority in a conspiracy of her closest male relatives, including her father, husband, and nephew—a cautionary tale for England’s new queen in 1553.17
Other echoes of the precedent set by Ferdinand and Isabel can be found in images of Philip and Mary’s co-monarchy, such as on the coinage. In Castile and León the heads of both Catholic kings appeared, whereas in Aragón and its kingdoms the bust was almost always exclusively of Ferdinand. An instruction sent to Toledo on May 23, 1475, following the agreement of the Concordia ordered their names, titles, busts, arms, and initials to appear on coinage—on the
Doble Castellano
(Excelente) “sus bultos (o figuras) sentados” [their bodies or figures seated] and on the
Medio y
Cuarto de Castellano
“sus bustos mirandose” [their profiles regarding each other]—while silver
Reales
had their conjoint royal arms.
18
Even after his wife’s death Ferdinand’s image continued to appear on all the coinage throughout the Spanish kingdoms. The iconography of shared monarchy that began to appear on English coinage from September 1554 combined elements from the earlier Spanish coins, with Philip and Mary in profile looking at each other, their joint arms and a floating crown above their heads. This almost identical image was seized upon by pamphleteers, who interpreted the floating crown as a symbol of the destruction of England’s discrete sovereignty. One pamphleteer complained that it signified “geving to the prince of Spayne (under the name of king) as much auctorite, as if he were king of England in dead. As ye may see...by the quoynid mony going abrode currant.”
19
Even though the arrangements between Philip and Mary might have been seen in exclusively Anglo-Burgundian terms, negotiated as they were by Simon Renard and Perrenot Granvelle and ratified in the Low Countries, not Spain, all of the clauses in the
capitulación
of the Catholic monarchs discussed here were echoed if not repeated in Philip and Mary’s treaty and marriage contract.
20
The treaty was signed by Charles V’s imperial delegates: Jean de Montmorency, sieur de Courrières; the Fleming, Charles de Laing, count of Egmont; and Philip Negri. When these ambassadors came to England, the Grey Friars chronicler described them as coming “in the name of the hole howse of Bowrgone.”
21
Nevertheless, high-level envoys of Philip were covering the ground between Spain and London.
III
Philip’s
mayordomo mayor
, Diego de Azevedo,
22
was continually in London from as early as May 1553, an example of “representation through intimacy.”
23
Renard wrote to the prince on September 6 that “don Diego will fill your majesty in on the occurences of this kingdom.”
24
Azevedo himself wrote an almost unknown account of Mary’s entry into London on August 1 that previous year to his wife back in Zamora.
25
In England he served as Philip’s
caballerizo mayor
[Master of the Horse] and remained at post there probably until 1557, when we know he returned to Spain.
26
The exclusion of Philip from the negotiations was more apparent than real. The treaty and contract had precedents in Spain and the Low Countries. The arrangements, given that he was marrying a queen regnant, were predictable and familiar, established forms of safeguarding succession and dynastic continuity. After Isabel’s death, despite nearly thirty years at the head of the Spanish kingdoms, Ferdinand’s resentment of his regency led him to retire to Aragón. Following the death of Philip the Fair and due to Juana’s apparent madness, Ferdinand again assumed the regency of Castile for Juana’s son Charles, in a deeply unpopular move that generated particular anxiety given his second marriage to Germaine de Foix, niece of the king of France Louis XII. Only the tragic death of Ferdinand and Germaine de Foix’s only child (a son) shortly after birth ensured that the kingdoms of Castile and Aragón and Spain remained united. A male heir to the Aragonese throne would have taken precedence over Juana and thereby Charles. If Philip had any illusions about his future role in English politics, this example should have been enough to disabuse him about the possibilities of negotiating the treacherous waters of an “admixture of nations.”27