Read Tudor Queenship: The Reigns of Mary and Elizabeth Online
Authors: Alice Hunt,Anna Whitelock
Tags: #Royalty, #Tudors, #England/Great Britain, #Nonfiction, #Biography & Autobiography
V
After Mary died on November 17, 1558, very few (if any) of the many precedents provided by the first queen regnant for the second were ever acknowledged, even though the first queen had established the necessary legal, ceremonial, and political adjustments for female monarchy. But although the transition from one monarch to the next was always potentially fraught with dispute, this one began decorously enough. The proclamation announcing Elizabeth’s accession was impeccable, setting out a conventional formula that she was now monarch because “it hath pleased Almighty God by calling to his mercy out of this mortal life, to our great grief, our dearest sister of noble memory, Mary, late Queen of England, France, and Ireland.”
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There were, however, to be no further occasions when Mary was described as Elizabeth’s “dearest sister.” That Mary’s funeral was a royal one, but only just, may be concluded on the surviving evidence that is rather sparse compared with the much fuller record of Henry VIII’s funeral. Despite recurrent rumors to the contrary, however, the despoliation of the furnishings in the nave of the Abbey that frequently followed royal occasions, both coronations and funerals, did not touch either Mary’s effigy or the hearse it lay on.
And once Mary was safely interred in Henry VII’s chapel dedicated to the glory of the Tudors, positive references to her disappeared from official contemporary history. In January 1559, Elizabeth entered upon the rounds of her coronation ceremonial. After five years of observing her half-sister establish many precedents for female monarchy, Elizabeth had the full range of Marian practices, both exemplary and admonitory, from which to borrow. Although she followed many of those examples, there were few occasions on which Elizabeth positively acknowledged that debt, and tacit denials of it, already clearly set out in her pre-coronation procession, had begun even earlier in her reign. One of the striking features of the published reports of Elizabeth’s coronation procession through London is the extent to which Mary’s reign was excluded from Elizabeth’s first great public occasion; where the previous monarch was mentioned, it was to offer implied repudiations of specific aspects of her reign.
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In that carefully constructed account, the reported aspersions cast on Mary were not accidental.
The late Queen Mary, like Edward VI, was absent from the pageant depicting Elizabeth’s genealogy, but siblings were always much less significant for legitimating a claim to reign than were the parents. It followed that Elizabeth’s mother was necessarily represented in that pageant, the first public celebration of her since Anne Boleyn’s shameful death, but it was to the new queen’s father that all subsequent references were made. Mary was entirely absent from any iconography and, unlike Edward, was mentioned only tangentially in the printed text. Instead, Elizabeth of York, wife of Henry VII and grandmother to the new Queen Elizabeth, was shown as coequal with her husband, as if co-ruler. Du ring his life, Henry VII had taken considerable pains to deny that he owed his throne in any way whatsoever to his marriage to the surviving heir of Edward IV, and he always kept his wife as far from political prominence as possible. In January 1559 she was, however, transformed into an available admirable precedent to the new Queen Elizabeth, as the appropriate exemplum should female monarchy again be raised as a problematic issue.
But the memory of Mary’s just-ended reign was invoked to shape the account of Elizabeth’s pre-coronation proceedings in significant ways. That can be seen in devices perhaps not contrived by Elizabeth but presumably made—and above all reported in the printed account—with her approval. Provided they had memories that could reach back more than two months, the audience for either the occasion or the text could hardly have been unaware of what was taking place. The first example was offered in the fourth pageant of the day, comparing the characteristics of a ruined commonwealth with those of a flourishing one. The tableau included a venerable ancient called “Tyme” and his daughter, identified as “Temporis filia.” The printed account continues: “And on her brest was written her propre name, which was Veritas, Trueth.” The opening verse of that pageant began as follows:
This olde man with the sythe, olde Father Tyme they call,
And her his daughter Truth, which holdeth yonder boke;
Whom he out of his rocke hath brought forth to us all,
From whence for many yeres she durst not once out loke.
The book, of course, was “Verbum Veritas the Woorde of Trueth.”
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There might be some surprise at this pageant in the implication that the vernacular Bible had been completely hidden and “for many years” at that. The Henrician Bible in English had not been banned by the Marian regime although some bishops did take it upon themselves to ban it within their own dioceses.
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But more surprising, not to say breathtaking, is the Elizabethan appropriation of Mary’s most familiar motto in reportedly declaring
herself
to be the daughter of time. The text
Veritas Temporis Filia
had appeared variously in Mary’s reign, including on her Great Seal of 1553. This multivalent iconic motto had earlier become a marker of the mid-sixteenth century struggle for religious legitimacy, but the difference here is one between the almost private use of it by Henry VIII and the possibly most public appropriation of one queen’s motto by the next queen in 1559.
Perhaps as remarkable is the final pageant of the day that showed the biblical Deborah, “richelie apparelled in parliament robes, with a sceptre in her hand, as a Quene” and with representatives of the three estates on either side. The printed account explains that this was to remind Elizabeth that she should consult about the government of her people, “considering God oftimes sent women nobly to rule among men; as Debora.”
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Well, yes, and more recently? In 1572, Grafton helpfully removed any doubt about the meaning of that pageant when he explained that it had been designed “to encourage the Quene not to feare though she were a woman; for women by the spirit or power of Almightye God, have ruled both honourably and pollitiquely.”
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So Mary was no model at all, presumably being incapable of either honorable or politic government. The sanctioned public attitude to Mary had moved a long way from being Elizabeth’s “dearest sister of noble memory” of Elizabeth’s accession proclamation. That hostile view of the Catholic Mary, which became both a religious necessity and a historical truth for many subsequent commentaries, was reinforced in that first account by the attention given to Elizabeth’s thankfulness as she set out from the Tower that, like Daniel in the lion’s den, she had been miraculously preserved from great danger in her previous sojourn in the Tower. There was no reminder that actually she was held there while being investigated for her possible (even probable) prior knowledge of the Wyatt rebellion.
Nevertheless, despite the extent to which she was to be repudiated and/or reviled by the new regime, Mary’s legacy was frequently an active presence in Elizabeth’s reign. It is not just that Elizabeth never modified Mary’s initiatives to establish the legality and practice of female monarchy. The similarity between some of the exempla used to praise Mary and those (re)deployed to praise the insistently different Elizabeth has recently been reexamined, and the debts owed by Elizabethan polemicists to their Marian precursors much more carefully demonstrated. What has now been demonstrated in admirable detail is the extent to which Elizabeth selectively but “deliberately cultivated and adopted” the “panoply of classical, biblical, and historical epithets [previously] lavished on her royal sister.”
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The appropriation of Mary’s motto
Veritas Temporis Filia
by Elizabeth was to be only the first of many such borrowings.
Elizabeth always claimed that she had learned during Mary’s reign the dangers of having a known next heir. In fact, it has been argued here, she learned and was instructed in many other matters besides the learning that—as Mary had repeatedly asserted and demonstrated—a female was as much monarch as a male. Mary’s sharp and decisive responses to the efforts by various of her parliamentarian advisers to intervene in her marriage plans prefigure Elizabeth’s equal hostility to similar approaches. But Elizabeth was not likely to acknowledge any debts to Mary, then or subsequently in her long reign. Rather, by 1563, Foxe opened discussion of Mary’s reign by defining it as “the horrible and bloudye tyme of Queene Marye” and concluded that “our history hasteth a pase (the Lorde be praysed) to the happy death of Quene Mary.”
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That was, it would seem, also the official line, almost uniformly followed by Protestant historians for centuries. This essay has been an exercise in demonstrating that, despite the assertions, quoted in the opening discussion, that Elizabeth had been left to fashion for herself an identity that “blurred the distinctions between male and female, king and queen,” it was in precisely those matters that her own occupation of the throne had been so comprehensively eased by Mary, England’s first queen regnant.
Notes