Writing Mary I: History, Historiography, and Fiction (Queenship and Power) 3030951316, 9783030951313

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Writing Mary I History, Historiography, and Fiction

Edited by Valerie Schutte Jessica S. Hower

Queenship and Power

Series Editors Charles E. Beem, University of North Carolina, Pembroke, NC, USA Carole Levin, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE, USA

This series focuses on works specializing in gender analysis, women’s studies, literary interpretation, and cultural, political, constitutional, and diplomatic history. It aims to broaden our understanding of the strategies that queens—both consorts and regnants, as well as female regents— pursued in order to wield political power within the structures of male-dominant societies. The works describe queenship in Europe as well as many other parts of the world, including East Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Islamic civilization.

More information about this series at https://link.springer.com/bookseries/14523

Valerie Schutte · Jessica S. Hower Editors

Writing Mary I History, Historiography, and Fiction

Editors Valerie Schutte Beaver Falls, PA, USA

Jessica S. Hower Southwestern University Georgetown, TX, USA

ISSN 2730-938X ISSN 2730-9398 (electronic) Queenship and Power ISBN 978-3-030-95131-3 ISBN 978-3-030-95132-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95132-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: De Luan/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To Eloise and Bates—our sources of inspiration and sleep deprivation.

Acknowledgements

Writing Mary I is the second volume in our series of essays on England’s first queen regnant. As with the first, we owe our contributors thanks for their tireless effort in writing thoughtful and thought-provoking essays while under the strenuous conditions and significant limitations imposed by national and international lockdowns as well as myriad other professional and personal hardships. We are consistently amazed with and thrilled by the fresh, innovative research that continues to be produced on Mary I and that demonstrates the necessity of this collection. We also thank the wonderful staff and editors at Palgrave Macmillan— namely Sam Stocker, Charles Beem, and Carole Levin—for their support and guidance. To our spouses, thank you for tolerating never-ending conversations about Mary and queenship, and making us better scholars for it.

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Praise for Writing Mary I

“This fascinating collection of wide-ranging essays provides an extensive exploration of multiple aspects of the life, reign, image, and afterlife of Mary I. It offers a deeper, more thorough examination of Mary, placing her center stage and convincingly establishing her importance as the first ruling queen of England without recourse to comparisons with her more well-known sister Elizabeth. The end result of these new insights is an expansion of knowledge about Mary and a significant contribution to Marian scholarship that provides a valuable resource for academics and students alike.” —Sarah Duncan, Professor of History, Spring Hill College, Alabama, USA

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Contents

Introduction Jessica S. Hower and Valerie Schutte

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Ambassador and Princess ‘A Paragon of Beauty, Goodness, and Virtue’: Princess Mary in the Writings of Imperial Ambassador Eustace Chapuys Derek M. Taylor Imperial Meddler/Marian Mentor: Eustace Chapuys and Mary Tudor in Film and Television William B. Robison

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European Entanglements Venetian Diplomacy Under Mary I Samantha Perez A Narrative That Was Not Her Own: Mary I as Mediterranean Queen Darcy Kern

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CONTENTS

Speaking from Spain From Lioness to Exemplary Yet Unsuccessful Queen: Mary I in Early Modern Spain Kelsey J. Ihinger Images of Mary I in Modern Spanish Media Tamara Pérez-Fernández

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Fact or Fiction Dressed to Kill: The Fashioning of “Bloody Mary” Emilie M. Brinkman

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Mary I in The Ringed Castle Alexander Samson

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Still Bloody Mary: Mary I in Historical Fiction Stephanie Russo

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Index

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Notes on Contributors

Emilie M. Brinkman is a historian of early modern Europe specializing in material culture, politics, and gender. She graduated from Purdue University in 2018 with her Ph.D. in Early Modern European History. She holds an M.A. in History from Miami University as well as a B.A. in History and A.A. in Art History from Thomas More College. She combines her work as an independent lecturer and scholar with part-time roles at Thomas More University in Crestview Hills, Kentucky and Maryville University in St. Louis. Her research areas include seventeenth-century political culture; fashion and material culture; display, representation, and identity; and the intersection of Renaissance history and modern pop culture. Her work on the history of modern British weddings has been featured in The Washington Post. She is currently working on her first monograph, “The Politics of Fashion in Stuart Britain, 1603–1714,” which examines how fashion and material objects served as a site for political discourse and agency during the seventeenth century. Jessica S. Hower earned her Ph.D. in History at Georgetown University in 2013, after completing her M.A. there in 2009 and her B.A. at Union College in 2006. She is currently an associate professor of History at Southwestern University, a small liberal arts college outside of Austin, Texas, where she teaches on Britain, Ireland, the British Empire, the Early Modern Atlantic World, comparative colonialism, gender, and memory. Her first monograph, Tudor Empire: The Making of Britain and the British Atlantic World, 1485–1603 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), explores xiii

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over a century of theorizing about and activity in the world beyond England’s borders, showing how enterprise aboard at once mirrored, responded to, and provoked politics and culture at home, while decisively shaping the broader Atlantic context. Other projects have appeared in Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice, Cannibalism and the Early Modern Atlantic, and Britain and the World, and The Oxford Handbook of Thomas More’s Utopia (forthcoming). Kelsey J. Ihinger received her Ph.D. in Spanish from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research focuses on the depiction of England in early modern Spain, the creation of Spain’s early modern imperial identity, and the relationship between history and fiction in texts that depict historical events and characters. She has published her work on the theatrical representations of Elizabeth I and Mary Stuart in Spanish drama with the Bulletin of the Comediantes and is currently preparing a manuscript on England’s place in the creation of Spain’s imperial image in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Darcy Kern earned her Ph.D. at Georgetown University and is Associate Professor of History at Southern Connecticut State University. Her research interests include language, translation, politics, and authority; Anglo-Spanish interactions; and cultural exchange in Western Europe and the Atlantic. She has published in journals such as Renaissance and Reformation, the Journal of Medieval History; and Philological Quarterly. Her chapter on Thomas More’s Utopia in Spain and Mexico is forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook of Utopia. She is currently finishing her first monograph, Translating Politics in Renaissance Europe. She has held fellowships with the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Huntington Library, UCLA’s Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, the American Catholic Historical Association, and the Connecticut State University System and has been a seminarian at the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Rare Books School (UVa). Samantha Perez is currently an Assistant Professor at Southeastern Louisiana University where she serves as the graduate coordinator for the Master’s program. She completed her Ph.D. from Tulane University in 2017 with a dissertation entitled “Roman Inheritance: Romanitas and Civic Identity in Trecento Siena” which explores the republic’s coordinated efforts to fabricate its own antiquity and assert an association with classical Rome in the early Renaissance. Her research interests are chiefly

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questions of identity and responses to other-ness in the early modern period and currently focus on diplomatic and economic encounters between Japanese and Italians in the late sixteenth century. Tamara P´erez-Fern´andez is an Assistant Professor at the University of Valladolid, where she teaches courses on English language and literature. She holds a degree in English Studies from the University of Valladolid, and a Ph.D. in English Studies from the Universities of Valladolid and Salamanca. Her research focuses on the paratextual materials and the textual transmission of the works of Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower, and specifically on the role of the scribes. As part of the research project “Exile, Diplomacy, and Textual Transmission: Networks of Exchange between the Iberian Peninsula and the British Isles,” funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovacion ´ y Universidades, she has written about Anglo-Spanish relations in the late middle ages and the early modern period. William B. Robison earned his Ph.D. at Louisiana State University in 1983 and is Professor of History and Head of the Department of History and Political Science at Southeastern Louisiana University; editor of History, Fiction, and ‘The Tudors’: Sex, Politics, Power, and Artistic License in Showtime’s Television Series (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); coauthor of The Tudors on Film and Television (McFarland, 2013); co-editor of Historical Dictionary of Late Medieval England (Greenwood, 2002) and Historical Dictionary of Stuart England (Greenwood, 1996); author of articles, book chapters, essays, and reviews dealing with early modern England, film history, and popular culture; director of the film Louisiana During World War II (2013); a published poet; a BMI-affiliated musician; and at work on a new edition of The Tudors on Film and Television, a book project about politics, religion, and society in Tudor Surrey, and another on the comic appropriation of the Tudors in film, fiction, and popular culture. Stephanie Russo is a Senior Lecturer and Discipline Chair of Literature at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. She is the author of The Afterlife of Anne Boleyn: Representations of Anne Boleyn in Fiction and on the Screen (2020) and Women in Revolutionary Debate: Female Novelists from Burney to Austen (2012). She specializes in historical fiction, and particularly in historical fiction about early modern women.

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She is currently working on a project on the use of anachronism in contemporary historical fiction, film, and television. Alexander Samson is a Reader in Early Modern Studies at University College London. His research interests include the early colonial history of the Americas, Anglo-Spanish intercultural interactions and early modern English and Spanish drama. His book Mary and Philip: The Marriage of Tudor England and Habsburg Spain was published by Manchester University Press in 2020. He runs the Golden Age and Renaissance Research Seminar and is director of UCL’s Centre for Early Modern Exchanges and the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters. Valerie Schutte is an independent scholar who specializes in royal Tudor women and book dedications. She has edited or co-edited four volumes on Queen Mary I, Shakespeare, and queenship, of which The Palgrave Handbook of Shakespeare’s Queens (2018) won the 2020 Royal Studies Journal book prize. Her first monograph is Mary I and the Art of Book Dedications: Royal Women, Power, and Persuasion (2015), which is the first comprehensive study of Mary’s books and those dedicated to her. Schutte’s second monograph, Princesses Mary and Elizabeth Tudor and the Gift Book Exchange, was published with ARC Humanities Press in 2021. She is currently editing a volume on the making and re-making of Lady Jane Grey and Mary and writing a cultural biography of Anne of Cleves. Derek M. Taylor is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the State University of New York at Buffalo with a conferral date of September 1, 2021. His research interests include early modern diplomacy, the migration of Scots Catholics to Europe, post-Reformation Catholicism in Britain, and female political leadership during the early modern era. His doctoral thesis focuses on the life and career of Scottish author and intellectual George Conn, who served as the papal emissary to the court of Queen Henrietta Maria from 1636 to 1639. Mr. Taylor currently serves as a history instructor at West Virginia State University in Institute, West Virginia, where he teaches courses in world history, British history, European history, and the history of female leadership.

Introduction Jessica S. Hower and Valerie Schutte

Readers of the introduction to volume one of this two-part edited collection will be familiar with one line of Mary I’s famous Guildhall Speech, in which she called upon “the worde of a Prince” to rally her subjects against the rebellion of Sir Thomas Wyatt in early February 1554, and that line’s significance for the eleven essays that followed. The most careful of those readers will have also noted a mention of several clauses—plural—that are ripe for reexamination and that function to encourage new scholarship, not merely one. Indeed, much as the first manifested so many of the themes central to the first volume, a second line serves the same purpose for volume two. After expressing her hope that she and her loyal subjects could be bound together in love and concord, both equally committed to the realm and its rightful rule, and defending her upcoming marriage to Philip of Spain as duly measured and considered, a Privy-Councilapproved means to honor and promote the English commonweal, Mary

J. S. Hower (B) Southwestern University, Georgetown, TX, USA e-mail: [email protected] V. Schutte Independent Researcher, Beaver Falls, PA, USA

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 V. Schutte and J. S. Hower (eds.), Writing Mary I, Queenship and Power, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95132-0_1

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explained that she was not particularly desirous or eager to wed. “But,” she declared, “if as my progenitors haue done before, it might please God that I might leaue some fruite of my bodie behind me to be your Gouernor, I trust you would not onely reioyce therat, but also I know it would be to your great comforte.”1 Of course, and quite famously, Mary did not leave any children behind at her death; she was, instead, succeeded by her younger half-sister Elizabeth I. However, if we isolate the middle portion of the sentence, in which the queen regnant hopes to “leaue some fruite of my bodie behind me,” and define that fruit more broadly than children alone, she was quite successful. Mary appreciated the power and importance of what might remain after her death, as well as how she was perceived more broadly. As such, her words encourage us to do the most with the literary remains composed by the many who have observed her, in life and in death, at home in England and further afield abroad, to look at Mary from multiple perspectives, and to appreciate the twists, turns, and continuities in her posthumous representation. Put simply, the queen’s words serve as a wonderful exhortation to explore the process and consequences of Writing Mary I . Following on the heels of a first book dedicated to examining representations of Queen Mary I in writing, this second book explores the multivalent means of writing that queen into text, very capaciously defined, from England to parts abroad, from the sixteenth century to the present, and from ostensibly factual primary sources to equally ostensibly fictional ones. In so doing, it retains the historiographical mission and thrust of volume one, while complementing and expanding upon its themes, including the value of transcending literary genres to create a holistic assessment of how the queen perceived herself and has been perceived by others across different kinds of sources, the utility of subjecting Mary to the same sorts of questions and same degree of in-depth scrutiny that her younger half-sister Elizabeth has received, the centrality of power and authority alongside foreign diplomacy, and more—all in service of making a significant contribution to the vibrant field that is twenty-first-century Marian Studies. Readers eager for more are encouraged to peruse volume

1 Richard Grafton, A Chronicle at large and meere History of the affayres of Englande and Kinges of the same, deduced from the Creation of the worlde, vnto the first habitation of thys Islande; and so by continuance vnto the first yere of the reigne of our most deere and souereigne Lady Queene Elizabeth: collected out of sundry Aucthors, whose names are expressed in the next Page of this leafe (London, 1569), 1333.

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one and its introduction for a more thorough conversation about the existing scholarly literature and the two-volume collection’s intervention in it, as well as for the first eleven essays on Mary as conveyed via the written word. Volume two opens by properly locating one of the most important foreigners at Mary’s court near the center of her monarchy and unpacking his vital contemporary role as well as his much more modest place in modern popular memory, helping to unearth the sometimes remembered, sometimes forgotten, and always important story of the “Ambassador and Princess.” Derek M. Taylor’s chapter reevaluates the relationship between Mary and Holy Roman Imperial ambassador Eustace Chapuys. He argues that returning to familiar, traditional source material—namely, Chapuys’s correspondence with Charles V as translated and summarized in the Calendar of State Papers, Spain and Letters and Papers of Henry VIII — and elevating third-person accounts reveals a new, clearer understanding of how Princess Mary was both viewed by and used by the Holy Roman Empire in its diplomatic dealings with England. Moreover, Taylor purports, Chapuys’s representations of Mary should be given more credibility than has hitherto been the case (and especially by comparison to the ambassador’s renderings of Anne Boleyn) because of Mary’s young age when they met, the genuine friendship that the pair built over time, and the princess’s precarious place at court. Doing so turns Chapuys’s letters from mere contextual evidence for the chaotic years when the divorce crisis wracked Europe into the basis for new appraisals, like a far more positive view of Mary than comes down to us from Protestant polemics and Taylor’s contention that Chapuys’s concern was not to damage Anne’s reputation, but rather to protect Mary. Through Taylor’s Chapuys, we can see the adolescence and maturation of England’s first regnant queen, and her important place in international politics. William B. Robison explores Mary I’s relationship with Eustace Chapuys in modern television and film, or more accurately, the rather surprising dearth of on-screen representations of the pair. He focuses on some of the most well-known and highly revered pieces of Tudorist popular culture produced over the last twenty years to show how opportunities to depict the Mary–Chapuys dynamic have been refused or ignored for the sake of apparently sexier topics, such as Henry VIII and his six wives and the rivalry between Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots, or of contemporary messages that seem to be at odds with

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traditional perceptions of the two, like the women’s and civil rights movements. While Mary and Chapuys often receive little or no screen time separately, let alone together, Robison shows that the decision has more to do with the biases of writers and producers than with the importance of the princess and ambassador as historical figures and puts film markedly at odds with newer historiographical trends. Significantly, Robison finds that, for all its faults and in contrast to the supposedly more high-brow Wolf Hall , Showtime’s The Tudors conveys Mary and Chapuys in a more successfully, casting them as historical actors with their own agency who were paramount to happenings at Henry’s court. Moving beyond Mary I’s years as a hopeful future queen and enveloping more than even the expansive Holy Roman Empire, the second set of chapters in this volume draws our gaze to other locales implicated in her reign, whether as a crucial diplomatic contact or because she was their queen consort, despite the lack of attention these “European Entanglements” have received in scholarly, popular, and even contemporary accounts. Samantha Perez examines Mary I and her court through the eyes of the Venetian ambassadors stationed there. By shifting emphasis away from the much more frequently examined Spanish and French perspectives and thereby complicating the picture of mid-sixteenth-century European diplomacy. She finds out just how important Mary was to navigating the vicissitudes of Continental politics, restoration Catholicism, and Italian affairs—as well as how acutely aware the Venetians were of that importance. Moreover, after briefly chronicling the rise of the Venetian embassy in Tudor England early in the reign of Henry VII and then continuing the narrative through to its departure over fifty years later, Perez uses their ambassadorial correspondence to shed new light on the queen herself, in matters of religion, rule, personality, and more, as viewed through Venice’s lens. Offering a fresh contribution to current discussions on Anglo-Italian relations and broader conceptions of early modern monarchical authority, diplomatic dynamics, and foreign policy, Perez argues that a Venetian look at Mary helps us better understand both the significance of her reign and England’s role on the international stage. Darcy Kern reminds us that owing to her marriage to Philip II, Mary was not only queen of England, Ireland, and (nominally) France, but also queen of Naples and, after 1556, of Spain—despite the lack of attention her role as consort in these more southern territories has received. Kern explains why: as Mary never stepped foot in either country, the

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queen was little known and rarely perceived as have any real authority in either. More specifically, Kern argues that in Naples, Mary’s power was inextricably linked to that of her husband and, as such, when he was perceived of as weak (which was so often the case), so too was Mary. In Spain, Mary was also marginalized and deemed lacking in royal authority there, this time on the basis of her power in England, the dominance of her Privy Council in political matters, and the nature of English society and governance more generally; her appearance, sexuality, and fertility, which failed to meet Spanish standards of beauty and fecundity; and her distance, both physical and imagined, from the Mediterranean country and its actual rule. To make matters worse, Philip did not really acknowledge his wife as Queen of Spain either, going so far as to ignore her in official correspondence near the end of her reign. Even though Mary was queen consort of these two realms, she maintained little if any authority among her Neapolitan and Spanish subjects and her image has been all but lost as a consequence. Fixing entirely on the site of Mary’s more famous consortship and moving the chronology ahead, two more essays uncover how the queen appears when “Speaking from Spain,” in the past and in the present. Here, it seems that complexity, nuance, multiplicity, even favor in Mary’s own lifetime and in the century that followed have given way to generality and easy stereotyping in our time. Kelsey J. Ihinger uses a close analysis of Mary I as depicted in Spain during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to challenge the automatic assumption that any mention of a blood-soaked, tragic Tudor monarch, especially a “bloody” Tudor queen, necessarily refers to her, rather than her father or half-sister, and bring to the fore a far more complicated story. In the hands of Spanish writers, who produced everything from traditional histories to pamphlets, popular plays, and poems, Mary’s image was a positive, if ever-shifting one, subject to frequent reshaping and revision as Anglo-Spanish relations, the broader European context, and global imperial politics themselves shifted. Eminently useful and malleable across her lifetime and in death, and especially during the four critical stages that Ihinger privileges, Mary functioned as a means by which her husband’s subjects could comment on changing circumstances, transforming their queen consort from a superlative and well-rounded leader, to a strong if less agentic defender of the Catholic faith, to an inspiring symbol of saintly piety, to a manifestation of Spain’s altered perceptions of an ascendant England. Ihinger shows that there was, then, never one single,

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stable Spanish Mary, but rather multiple versions, each constructed and reconstructed to suit the architect’s needs. Tamara Pérez-Fernández surveys modern Spanish media depictions of Mary I. Charting the significant if modest burst of recent television episodes, radio broadcasts, print articles, and digital pieces that portray the queen for Spanish audiences, Pérez-Fernández finds that Mary is, unsurprisingly, largely stereotyped as “Bloody Mary” and presented as a failure of queenship and motherhood. Following extensive quantitative as well as qualitative analysis, the author argues that conservative media tends to be more interested in Mary and to offer a more sympathetic view of her than its more progressive counterpart, yet neither offers a nuanced picture of Spain’s queen consort, instead resorting to familiar images of failure, unattractiveness, religious zealotry, instability, and childhood trauma. Even though these renderings have emerged simultaneous with groundbreaking revisionist histories and an increased interest in mining the past for popular culture, the author shows that mainstream Spanish sources have not adopted the newest historiography of Mary, resulting in the regurgitation of old tropes. Nevertheless, there is reason for hope; as the more in-depth, subtle study of important women in Spanish history now grips the academy, perhaps it will one day grip the press and screen as well. The volume and, by extension, the full collection closes with a final set of three chapters at the messy intersection of history and literature, showcasing what it means to write about and portray Mary I in our own time, whether in the form of screenplays, theatrical plays, or novels. The authors demonstrate that there is both “Fact and Fiction” at work in popular culture that centers on the queen or her era, but also find that these pieces are few and far between and that not all of them are informed by current historiographical trends or even what we “know” about the past in which Mary lived. The scoresheet shows a decidedly mixed result. In this, perhaps, historical fiction, in all of its forms, is not unlike academic scholarship: there is much to commend revisionist work on Mary I, yet there is still a long way to go. Emilie M. Brinkman investigates the role of costume in the construction of Mary I’s negative reputation in history and in popular culture. Beginning with arguably the most potent modern visual representation, Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth (1998), then shifting back in time to fill in the gap between the sixteenth and late twentieth centuries, Brinkman examines descriptions of Mary’s dress during her lifetime, as well as how

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the queen was dressed in posthumous stage and screen productions. She argues that beginning in the seventeenth century, sartorial depictions of Mary do not accurately reflect what the queen wore; rather, they fabricate and reinforce a dark, bloody image. During her reign, and even reaching back to her childhood, Mary seemed to favor a French style of dress, as opposed to the Spanish style she is typically portrayed in. In two early seventeenth-century plays, staged amid Stuart-era anti-papal hysteria, Mary is given all the material trappings of Catholicism and her attention to dress is meant to be a commentary on the opulence and excess supposedly inherent to the faith. The eighteenth-century Jacobite threat further exacerbated Mary’s bad reputation, and this is what manifested in the nineteenth century, as Mary’s concern for proper attire borders on the obsessive—a warning against the tyranny and vanity of Catholic rule— and she is increasingly appareled in red. Brinkman contends that Mary’s wardrobe is an understudied aspect of her reign, and must be interrogated as more than merely a foil to the well-dressed Elizabeth. Alexander Samson’s chapter focuses on the fifth installment of Dorothy Dunnett’s The Lymond Chronicles, set in the reign of Mary I and Philip II. Like much of Dunnett’s work, The Ringed Castle (1971) has received almost no academic treatment, yet Samson shows that it is meticulously researched and written, informed by copious primary source material, brimming with historically accurate detail, and keenly aware if not actually ahead of the relevant scholarly literature, not to mention a world-wide bestseller. Moreover, he argues, the novel offers a unique perspective on Mary and Philip’s court, appreciating the interplay between individual and broader forces, bringing the mid-Tudor world and its cultural fabric tangibly to life, and foregrounding England’s activity abroad, especially in Russia, as well as the gendered dynamics at work with a woman on the throne—all in a way that exemplifies the close, complex relationship between history and literature. Dunnett’s duly complex Mary is both the familiar bloody queen and the more sympathetic, politically astute woman, as influenced by nineteenth- and twentieth-century histories that vilify and pity her and Dunnett’s own reading of sixteenth-century sources that acknowledged Mary’s achievements. Stephanie Russo offers a careful study of twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury historical fiction featuring Mary I, ultimately showing that these fictionalized portrayals have not caught up to the historical revision of Mary’s reign championed by academics over the same period, but instead

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perpetuate her bloody popular image. Appreciating the untapped potential that fictionalization might provide such a frequently maligned subject, Russo focuses on novels in which Mary is the main character, of which there are relatively few, especially compared to those centered on her stepmother Anne Boleyn or her successor Elizabeth I. She suggests that this dearth carries significant cultural and misogynist baggage, stemming from the idea that a younger husband would not fall in love with an older wife, that a proto-feminist Gloriana needed a negative foil, and that Mary’s reign lacked a dramatic moment of romance or victory (even if invented), such as Henry VIII’s break with Rome for Anne Boleyn or Elizabeth’s Tilbury speech in the face of the Spanish Armada. Accordingly, novelized treatments of Mary have only confirmed what historians have increasingly rejected and granted the myth of England’s first and failed queen regnant even more staying power. Twenty essays across two volumes later, the significance of Mary I in writing and of writing Mary I should be abundantly and unequivocally obvious. Perhaps, then, it is only the years in which scholars failed to pay the queen any heed that constitute a “barren interlude.”2

2 Conyers Read, The Tudors : Personalities and Practical Politics in Sixteenth Century England (New York: Norton, 1936), 144.

Ambassador and Princess

‘A Paragon of Beauty, Goodness, and Virtue’: Princess Mary in the Writings of Imperial Ambassador Eustace Chapuys Derek M. Taylor

Protestant polemics regarding her reign in the century-and-a-half after her death aside, it is nevertheless little surprise that Mary I became one of England’s most notorious monarchs if her adolescence and early adulthood are considered in full. Declared illegitimate by her father, King Henry VIII in 1533, Mary spent much of her time as a young woman mourning the loss of her father’s favor and the poor treatment he bestowed upon her mother, Queen Catherine of Aragon, prior to the queen’s death in 1536. Throughout this period, Mary’s friend Eustace Chapuys served the princess not only as her confidant and political advisor but also as her champion during his time as the Holy Roman Imperial ambassador to Henry’s court until his retirement in 1545. As such, the Savoy native was a pivotal figure in Mary’s maturation process. Although Chapuys was Catherine’s chief ally, it was through that tie that the ambassador also built a strong relationship with Mary, who was thirteen years old when the two met and twenty-nine when Chapuys left England. Their relationship began just as the roots of the English Reformation were

D. M. Taylor (B) West Virginia State University, Institute, WV, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 V. Schutte and J. S. Hower (eds.), Writing Mary I, Queenship and Power, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95132-0_2

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beginning to sprout, and the friendship was tied to some of the starkest changes made by Parliament at Henry’s behest to the Church of England. This important period in Mary’s development is portrayed in regular correspondence between Chapuys and Mary’s cousin, Emperor Charles V. These letters, translated in the nineteenth century and available in full in the Calendar of State Papers and among the Letters and Papers series, provide us with assessments of not only Mary’s political value to Charles’s goals as emperor, but more importantly to this project, of Mary’s person.1 An assessment of these works provides access to a version of Chapuys’s thoughts about her that direct correspondence with the princess might not reveal for a variety of reasons, including that Chapuys might have feared being overly negative with Mary since that could jeopardize the stability of his own position. After all, Mary’s wellbeing was not the primary concern of the emperor throughout Chapuys’s embassy. Instead, Mary’s plight became a development of interest only after Chapuys had been there for several years. Mary’s lack of active participation in these epistolary conversations allows this study to add to historiography regarding third-party opinion of Mary both as a human being and as a person of political interest to foreign entities, namely by the Holy Roman Empire and its representative in England. This work, therefore, fits alongside recent scholarship that address these third-party writings such as Valerie Schutte’s “Under the Influence: The Impact of

1 Calendar of State Papers, Spain, Volume 4 Part 1, Henry VIII, 1529–1530. Edited by Pascual de Gayangos (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1879); Calendar of State Papers, Spain, Volume 4, Part 2, Henry VIII, 1530–33. Edited by Gayangos (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1882). Abbreviated as CSP: Spain in subsequent citations; Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, Volume 6, 1533. Edited by James Gairdner (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1882); Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, Volume 7, 1534. Edited by Gairdner (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1883); Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, Volume 8, January–July 1535. Edited by Gairdner (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1885); Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, Volume 9, August– December 1535. Edited by Gairdner (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1886); Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, Volume 10, January–June 1536. Edited by Gairdner (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1887); Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, Volume 11, July–December 1536. Edited by Gairdner (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1888); and Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, Volume 17, 1542. Edited by Gairdner and R.H. Brodie (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1900). Abbreviated at L&P with volume notations in subsequent citations.

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Queenly Book Dedications on Princess Mary” and “Religion and Translation at the Court of Henry VIII: Princess Mary, Katherine Parr and the Paraphrases of Erasmus,” by Aysha Pollnitz.2 Yet whereas those works address the various influences on Mary’s development, including that of foreigners, the present study reverses the equation, revealing how Mary’s development influenced—even altered how foreign entities viewed her and how they approached England during her upbringing. Schutte’s work is of particular value here because the Mary portrayed by Schutte, a young woman believed by writers such as Erasmus to be destined to follow in the pious and headstrong footsteps of her mother and grandmother, is easily recognizable in Chapuys’s representation of the princess.3 Chapuys’s correspondence has served as a foundation for much of the historical research regarding Henry VIII’s pursuit of an annulment of his first marriage, and as the basis for much of our understanding of contemporary public opinion regarding Anne Boleyn. Mary’s relationship with Chapuys and her role in attempts by European political entities to keep England within the Catholic realm have not been given nearly the same amount of consideration. This can be attributed to the influence of A.G. Dickens’s The English Reformation, which argues that Henry VIII’s cleaving of the English Church from Rome was the result of a groundswell of popular dissatisfaction with the Vatican that had begun well before Henry’s reign.4 This “ground-up” view diminishes the role of high politics and Henry’s personal aims in the process, making the move away from Rome appear as a phenomenon and success attributable instead to Henry’s subjects. Therefore, Mary’s role in the Long English Reformation can more easily be cast as a step backward in the tale of

2 Aysha Pollintz, “Religion and Translation at the Court of Henry VIII: Princess Mary, Katherine Parr and the Paraphrases of Erasmus,” in Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman, eds., Mary Tudor: Old and New Perspectives (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 123–137. 3 Valerie Schutte, “Under the Influence: The Impact of Queenly Book Dedications on Princess Mary,” in Sarah Duncan and Valerie Schutte, eds., The Birth of a Queen: Essays on the Quincentenary of Mary I (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 39–40. 4 A.G. Dickens, The English Reformation (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, Second Edition, 1989), 12–15. Dickens argues that religious change in England was fundamentally tied to movements that predated Henry VIII’s reign, and gives pride of place to Wycliffe’s movement, whose followers in turn became more openly receptive to Lutheranism.

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English progress, and her relationship with Chapuys can more acceptedly considered to be a moot point. Followed by the works of Patrick Collinson and Diarmaid McCulloch, the English Reformation had been made “properly Protestant,” as described by Christopher Haigh.5 Due in part to the inconsistency of his reports regarding Anne Boleyn as well as his identity as a Catholic Savoyard, Chapuys has not traditionally been considered a significant figure in the English Reformation or within the field of Marian studies. Retha Warnicke’s The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn is perhaps the best example of the difficulty historians have experienced in properly positioning and considering the ambassador. Warnicke argued that Chapuys’s characterizations of Boleyn should be discounted due to their inconsistencies with other third-party accounts of identical events, and Warnicke portrayed Chapuys as an untrustworthy historical source.6 At the same time, she accepted Chapuys’s accounts when it suited her arguments.7 Warnicke’s trouble results from not considering the context of Chapuys’s role and identity in determining the content of his reports. Her challenge to the reliability of Chapuys’s accounts was nevertheless a positive development in itself, as prior to her work few challenged the validity of the source material regarding Boleyn. This was the case for many historians, including Mortimer Levine.8 Historians have more recently begun to fully recognize Chapuys’s importance to the Tudor era and are taking pains to properly contextualize his accounts. Lauren Mackay’s biography of Chapuys was a first.9 Mackay’s accounts of Chapuys’s upbringing in Savoy and of his personal

5 Christopher Haigh, “Dickens and the English Reformation,” Historical Research, No. 77 (2004), 25. 6 Retha M. Warnicke, The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1989), 1–3. Chapuys’s references to Boleyn as “the whore” and “the concubine” were terms for Henry’s second queen that were coined by Dr. Pedro Ortiz, the Holy Roman Imperial ambassador to the Vatican while Chapuys was in England. Chapuys followed Ortiz’s lead in such references in subsequent correspondence between the emissaries and elsewhere. 7 Warnicke, Rise and Fall, 72. 8 Warnicke, Rise and Fall, 66; Mortimer Levine, Tudor Dynastic Problems, 1460–1571

(New York: Allen & Unwin, 1975), 55–66. Warnicke notes the existence of this problem, indicating its negative impact on historical understanding of not just Anne Boleyn, but also of Catherine Howard. 9 Lauren Mackay, Inside the Tudor Court: Henry VIII and His Six Wives Through the Writings of the Spanish Ambassador, Eustace Chapuys (London: Amberley, 2014).

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ambitions finally provided context that helps explain why he characterized events and people the way he did in his correspondence. Although comparably little space is devoted to the ambassador’s relationship with Mary, the humanization of Chapuys that Mackay accomplished breathes life into not only his own words, but importantly, the personalities of those about whom he wrote. Mackay’s approach allowed for the acceptance of Chapuys’s accounts as legitimate with the caveat that he was often providing straightforward observations through a filter of what his best guess was regarding what the emperor wanted to know or what the emperor would be most receptive to learning. At the same time, the increased human element to his writings enables a more thorough understanding of his subjects to develop. This approach is most useful when assessing Chapuys’s writings, and is appropriated for this chapter. Herein lies the promise of using Chapuys to more fully examine Mary, and as her role waxed and waned in England across his embassy, so too did her importance to Habsburg and Catholic interests and the extent to which the ambassador’s reports smacked of political spin. Mary’s age when the two first met, the status of her parents’ marriage, and Mary’s own changing positions vis-à-vis her father suggest that Chapuys would have little ability to make such an unpredictable period in the princess’s life conform to a pre-established template. Mackay argues that Mary’s willingness to accept Chapuys’s suggestions in dealing with her father was indicative of the quality of their friendship.10 Anna Whitelock used Chapuys’s correspondence quite extensively in her portrait of Mary’s adolescence and young adulthood, but even in matters such as Chapuys’s reporting of what he suspected was Anne Boleyn’s intended treachery toward Mary, the ambassador remained a source, and his relationship with Mary was not investigated.11 Stephen Hamrick, meanwhile, used Chapuys’s correspondence in ways that clearly suggest the ambassador’s affinity for the princess.12 These depictions represent a move forward from earlier characterizations of Mary as a tool of the Holy Roman

10 Mackay, Tudor Court, 189. 11 Anna Whitelock, Mary Tudor: Princess, Bastard, Queen (New York: Random House,

2009), 51–52. 12 Stephen Hamrick, “‘His wel beloved doughter Lady Mary’: Representing Mary Tudor in 1534,” Renaissance Studies Vol. 31, No. 4 (September, 2017), 502.

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Empire via Chapuys’s direction.13 The portrait of Mary conveyed by Chapuys alternates between frightened, frail, and helpless young woman and headstrong, competent, and pious potential leader of England, the model of proper governance. Both could absolutely be true, and given this, Chapuys’s representation of her presents a wide and complex range of characteristics of the princess that is valuable to our historical understanding of Mary as she emerged from adolescence. By privileging the ambassador’s representations of the princess in their own right, rather than as mere contextual evidence, this chapter reveals a more complex picture of the Chapuys–Mary dynamic and a deeper understanding of how and why the Holy Roman Empire viewed her as it did. The result is to demonstrate the strong friendship that developed between the pair and suggests that his accounts should be afforded significantly more credibility with regard to Mary than of other subjects such as Anne Boleyn.

Chapuys’s Arrival in England Although never formally invested with the title Princess of Wales, Mary had been granted the royal prerogatives reserved for the heir to the English throne four years prior to Chapuys’s arrival in England. As such, her status as the beloved daughter of the king had changed little regardless of Henry’s growing dissatisfaction at having no male heir. Mary accompanied Henry and Catherine to mass on January 2, 1530, and in early 1531 the princess visited the queen for a month while their family unit was deteriorating rapidly. Henry banished his wife from court in July of that year, and Mary moved to Richmond, yet there was still little to suggest Mary’s status was to soon take a significant turn for the worse. In fact, even later, when Mary moved into housing with Anne Boleyn’s daughter, the infant Elizabeth, such an occurrence was not uncommon. Remarriages were actually more common in early modern England than they are in the modern era, and the combination of households, even among the aristocracy, was not unusual.14 The maintenance of Mary’s materialistic well-being, however, was misleading.

13 David Loades, Mary Tudor: A Life (Malden: Blackwell Publishers, Second Edition, 1992), 89. 14 Ralph A. Houlebrooke, The English Family 1450–1700 (London: Routledge, 1984),

215.

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Chapuys’s first mentions of Mary in his letters to Charles V were limited to vague reports of potential marriage matches made for her by her father. In fact, much of the correspondence between Chapuys and Charles regarding Mary centered on Henry’s search for a suitable husband for her. These dispatches became more specific in November 1530, when Mary was fourteen and the potential match in question was the eighteen-year-old King James V of Scotland.15 Chapuys’s explanation of the situation made clear Mary’s importance in foreign policy at this stage of Henry’s reign. “Some suspect that a promise has been more, or some hope held out of a marriage of the young King with the Princess, as it may divert the Scotch from any project of alliance with Your Majesty or any other power,” Chapuys wrote, adding that he hoped to provide more information on the matter in his next letter.16 No such information followed, although a letter from the Imperial ambassador to Venice, Rodrigo Nino, to the emperor written November 30 mentioned another possible match for Mary, the Duke of Milan.17 Having already been betrothed to a number of continental princes from an extremely young age, Mary remained fair game for Henry’s political intrigues until her bastardization relegated her to a position of lesser consideration in his pursuit of matches. Elizabeth’s station as heir complicated Mary’s status in these negotiations, as she became of less interest to other heirs, although the French were consistently more interested in Mary than in Elizabeth. The princess and ambassador did not immediately begin correspondence and private visits upon his arrival, but as the king’s pursuit of an annulment intensified and his relationship with his family became increasingly strained, Chapuys began to visit Catherine and Mary’s households independently, a strategy he applied of his own volition. Chapuys had already grown protective and almost defensive of Mary during his

15 Chapuys to Charles V, Nov. 27, 1530, “Spain: November 1530, 26–31” in CSP: Spain, Vol. 4, Part 1, 819. Chapuys first mentions a potential marriage for Mary in October 1529, with the rumor of Henry marrying her to Henry Howard, oldest son of the Duke of Norfolk. 16 Chapuys to Charles V, Nov, 27 1530. 17 Rodrigo Nino to Charles V, Nov. 30, 1530, CSP: Spain, Vol. 4, Part 1, 830.

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earliest dispatches, before the two were well acquainted.18 He saw her as collateral damage to Henry’s actions, and worse, that her father was not mindful or bothered by the damage being done.19 It was as Mary became increasingly isolated from her father, however, that the combination of Chapuys’s Catholicism and his own excitable nature began to find a welcome friend in the princess. By the time Chapuys wrote to the emperor on April 6, 1533, Henry had secretly married Anne Boleyn, and the new queen was pregnant. In reaction to Catherine’s pleas for help and their shared concern for Mary’s well-being, Chapuys wrote that, “the great interest I take in Your Majesty’s concerns compels me to say that, considering the very great injury done to Madame, your aunt, you can hardly avoid making war upon this king and kingdom.”20 In this same letter, Chapuys argued that military action would not solely be on behalf of Mary and Catherine, but also a religious matter. Also implicating Archbishop Thomas Cranmer in Mary and Catherine’s plights, he added that war against England would prevent the kingdom from alienating itself entirely from Catholicism and becoming Lutheran, a development Chapuys feared was likely to occur thanks to Cranmer and the king. Chapuys wanted not only for Charles to declare war on England, but for Pope Clement VII to “call in the secular arm” and endorse such military action.21 It was, in part, Mary’s popularity that lead Chapuys to advise such a course of action, although his opinion could have been colored by his own affinity for the princess. He wrote, “It is very true, that if the Princess were not in such danger as I have said, and that if the people here did not take up this affair a little warmly, they would lose heart and affection.”22 Chapuys quickly apologized for what he feared might be construed as

18 Chapuys to Charles V, Dec. 9, 1529, CSP: Spain, Vol. 4, Part 1, 361–362. Chapuys writes that Mary is in Windsor, and reports that his sources tell him she is being treated well below a person of her rank and birth. He adds that he recently received a message from Mary indicating she was working to find a way Chapuys could visit her without being noticed. 19 Chapuys to Charles V, Jan. 20, 1530, CSP: Spain, Vol. 4, Part 1, 433–434. Here, Chapuys expresses concern that Mary’s marriage potential would be greatly harmed should Henry be granted a divorce and the princess be declared illegitimate. 20 Chapuys to Charles V, April 10, 1533, CSP: Spain, Vol. 4, Part 2, 629. 21 Chapuys to Charles V, April 10, 1533. 22 Chapuys to Charles V, April 10, 1533, L&P, Vol. 6, 151.

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an emotional outburst, and added, “Pray, pardon me, if I thus speak out of compassion for the Queen and the Princess.”23 Through this letter, Mary is viewed as not only beloved by her father’s subjects, but also as a bastion of the Catholic faith in England. Her loss of legal status as heir had, if anything, a positive effect on her public image. This passion for Mary’s well-being reached significant heights at times, and provides ample opportunity to question Chapuys as a credible source for the period, as it is easy to draw a connective line between his excitability and the suggestions and requests he presented to the emperor with regard to the events he observed. Perhaps the best example of Chapuys’s tendency to either exaggerate or to fall victim to worst-case scenario rumor regarding Mary came in his reporting of Elizabeth’s birth, on September 7, 1533. Three days later, Chapuys wrote that he had been told the baby was to be named Mary so that the newborn not only assumed the position of Henry’s eldest child in the line of succession, but completed the process by taking her name.24 The exasperation expressed in Chapuys’s letter to Charles regarding this development is revealing in numerous ways. First, it vividly illustrates how affected Chapuys could be by the prospect of Mary being disrespected, marginalized, or dispossessed. It also shows that his ability to discern between credible information and rumor was possibly subject to his emotional attachment to the subject. Chapuys lunged to the conclusion that what he had been told was true rather than questioning the validity of the information. Furthermore, it indicated the possibility that perhaps his affinity for Mary was so well known that those from whom he gained information might have been toying with the ambassador, or even feeding him false information knowing that he would report it to the emperor. There is no indication of Chapuys’s reaction when he learned that Anne Boleyn’s daughter was indeed named Elizabeth, though it is difficult to imagine that it would be lacking either relief or embarrassment. His next letter to Charles, dated September 15, simply stated, “The daughter of the lady has been named Elizabeth, not Mary.”25 In the same letter, Chapuys explained how Mary had reacted to the developments, and to the assumption that Henry would further diminish her household

23 Chapuys to Charles V, April 10, 1533. 24 Chapuys to Charles V, Sept. 10, 1533, L&P, Vol. 6, 465. 25 Chapuys to Charles V, Sept. 15, 1533, L&P, Vol. 6, 469.

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in the wake of Elizabeth’s birth. He wrote, “Like a wise and virtuous princess as she is, she takes matters patiently, trusting in the mercy of God, and has written a comforting letter to the Queen her mother, which is wonderfully good.”26 Of course, this does not fit the portrait of Mary as recorded largely by Protestant polemicists regarding Mary’s demeanor, even though her late teenage years are widely separated from the era of her life most focused upon by those writers and later Whig historians.27 Furthermore, given Mary’s excitability and expressions of fear and abandonment throughout this period, the characterization of her reaction can be seen as being at odds with the expected. Mary was portrayed as nearly stoic in this instance. If Chapuys accurately reported her response, it could be viewed as a portent of the way in which she handled the issue of her gender in her removal of Jane Grey as queen twenty years later. Mary at that point exhibited her worthiness of the role of monarch to those loyal to her by not allowing her temper to dominate her strategy for accession.28 Mary’s confrontation with her father took place soon after Elizabeth’s birth through sparring that lasted more than a month through letters written by the king and his daughter. Prior to the parliament that met to deem Mary illegitimate, Henry sent to Duke of Norfolk, Thomas Howard, to meet with her to inform her of her new status. Mary was not only indignant toward Norfolk, but if Chapuys’s account is accepted, she managed to remain self-assured in doing so, although we must understand he was relying completely on Mary’s account of the incident for his source material. When Norfolk suggested Mary pay her respects to Princess Elizabeth, Mary replied that she was the only princess, and at most would call her “sister.”29 Mary further extended a request to Norfolk that she begged to receive her father’s blessing, though Norfolk refused to deliver such a message, leaving Mary to flee the scene in tears. Chapuys wrote that this exchange led Henry to scold Norfolk for not accomplishing the 26 Chapuys to Charles V, 470. 27 Tessa Grant, “’Thus Like a Nun, Not Like a Princess Born’: Dramatic Representa-

tions of Mary Tudor in the Early Years of the Seventeenth Century,” in Susan Doran and Thomas S, Freeman, eds., Mary Tudor: Old and New Perspectives (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 62–63. 28 Charles Beem, The Lioness Roared: The Problems of Female Rule in English History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 78. 29 Chapuys to Charles V, Dec. 16, 1533, L&P, Vol. 6, 617.

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task of bringing Mary to Elizabeth. The king further proclaimed that he would break Mary of her prideful streak one way or another.30 Chapuys was enthusiastic when Mary stuck up for herself in any manner that inconvenienced Anne Boleyn or her family, and that is how he viewed this transaction, as Norfolk was Anne’s uncle. He was not interested in Howard’s rebuke for failing to produce results for Henry. However, Chapuys knew that Mary charted a dangerous path for herself in taking these steps.31 An earlier letter, written October 10, 1533, informed the emperor that Bishop John Fisher had joined Chapuys in encouraging Mary to challenge her father’s wishes regarding her place in the succession, which on one hand is curious given Fisher’s earlier pleas to Catherine to simplify Henry’s path.32 The Fisher–Chapuys alliance in this matter therefore indicates a change in the bishop’s opinion of how best to manage the situation, or that Fisher saw that Mary’s fate was a significantly different issue than Catherine’s due to Mary’s previous status as heir. The issue is tied to the state of religion in England through this period and Mary’s adherence to Catholicism. Perhaps the earliest inklings of the potential religious strife of the 1550s are suggested in Chapuys’s letters. Fisher’s willingness to join Chapuys in encouraging Mary to oppose Henry’s designation of himself as the head of the Church of England indicates that others also put their trust in Mary as a bastion of hope for the old faith. Indeed, Fisher agreed with Chapuys regarding a potential invasion by the Holy Roman Empire, and this correspondence verifies the existence of a Catholic conspiracy against Henry that involved the emperor, his agent, and the bishop in a group that was working to pull Mary into their ranks. Catherine, meanwhile, had encouraged her daughter to do the opposite of what Chapuys had instructed. A letter from the former queen to Mary believed to have been written September 15, 1533 begged Mary, “Answer you with few words, obeying the King your father in everything, save only that you will not offend God and lose your own soul.”33 Catherine worked to convince Mary that adherence to God would deliver

30 Chapuys to Charles V, 617. 31 Chapuys to Charles V, 617. 32 Chapuys to Charles V, Oct. 10, 1533, L&P, Vol. 6, 510–511. 33 Catherine of Aragon to the Princess Mary, Sept. 15, 1533, L&P, Vol. 6, 472.

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her from whatever ill effects Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn were bound to cast upon her. The letter is a good indicator of how Catherine’s increased expression of piety had clouded her vision of the reality that Chapuys and Fisher were arming Mary to help forward their own goals. The comparison between Chapuys’s description of Mary and Catherine’s tone in addressing her daughter indicates that it was Chapuys who had gained the upper hand influencing and guiding the princess by this point. The ambassador saw her as a capable and useful political resource for the aims of the Holy Roman Empire and the Catholic Church, while her mother still viewed her solely as a child. At the same time, Chapuys viewed Mary as an impressionable young friend for whom he felt a protective responsibility. He regularly included reports to Charles about the devotion the public retained for Mary.34 It is a telling characteristic of his relationship with the princess that with all the domestic and international political intrigue playing out around him, Chapuys was most moved by the safety and well-being of a young woman still in her teenage years. Chapuys’s place in history is largely due to his antagonistic stance regarding Anne Boleyn, but this is perhaps due to historical interest being more vested in conflict rather than agreement. The evidence that remains from the period, however, suggests quite strongly that Chapuys was more interested and invested in protecting Mary than he was in damaging Anne. Chapuys was also involved in playing matchmaker for Mary, and in this pursuit he definitely had designs on securing the English throne for Catholicism. Not long after Elizabeth’s birth, Chapuys agreed, with input from Catherine and Mary, to suggest to Charles that Reginald Pole was a fitting match for Mary. Pole was the son of Mary’s governess, Margaret Pole, who was herself the daughter of the former Duke of Clarence. Reginald Pole was at the time studying at the University of Padua, and if Charles was able to bring him into the emperor’s service, Catherine would gladly consent to have her daughter marry him, “and the Princess would not refuse.”35 Within six months, Charles V issued a policy that 34 Chapuys to Charles V, Oct. 16, 1533, CSP: Spain, Vol. 4, Part 2, 828. Chapuys here writes, “It is impossible for me to describe the love and affection which the English bear to their Princess, but they are already so much accustomed to see and tolerate such disorderly things that they tacitly commit the redress of the same to God and to Your Majesty.” This dispatch was sent in the wake of the reduction of Mary’s household. 35 Chapuys to Charles V, Sept. 27, 1533, L&P, Vol. 6, 486.

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Mary should not be married without the consent of her mother and the emperor.36 The move was largely ceremonial and part of a larger statement regarding the emperor’s distrust of English relations with France, but it nevertheless sent a message of sorts that since Henry VIII no longer appeared to care for the well-being of Catherine and his first-born daughter, the Holy Roman Empire would gladly have them.

Chapuys Moves on Mary’s Behalf Mary was presented with a notice of her reduced status and illegitimately by Lord John Huse in September 1533. In response to Mary’s refusal to acknowledge these new realities, the king issued a statement the following month that vividly detailed his displeasure with his bastardized daughter. Henry chastised Mary, writing that she had forgotten her “filial piety and allegiance” in her attempt to “arrogantly usurp the title of Princess” from Elizabeth, further noting that Mary could not, in good conscience, believe that she is actually the King’s lawful daughter, much less believe that Henry agreed with her regarding this opinion.37 Henry also hinted that Mary knew how dangerous the ground on which she was treading was, and that it was punishable by law. As was common for the king, he did end the statement by extending a potential olive branch to his daughter, writing, “on her conforming to his will he may incline of his fatherly piety to promote her welfare.”38 The tension between Mary and Henry carried over well into the following years. In January 1534, the king traveled to see Elizabeth, whose household was twenty miles from London. Mary was also living there in the infant’s service, and although Henry spent time with his new daughter, he did not visit with Mary. After months of gnashing his teeth over the situation and making no headway, Chapuys sought to address parliament regarding the treatment of Mary and Catherine in February 1534. Chapuys believed he would be denied this opportunity, and he was correct. However, it appears that he asked for this in order to be granted a lesser request as consolation.39

36 The Emperor’s Policy, Feb. 25, 1534, “Henry VIII: February 1534, 21–25,” in L&P, Vol. 7 , 89–90. 37 King Henry VIII, “The Princess Mary”, Sept. 30. 1533, L&P, Vol. 6, 491. 38 King Henry VIII, “The Princess Mary”, 491. 39 Chapuys to Charles V, Feb. 26, 1534, L&P, Vol. 7 , 92.

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To the ambassador’s surprise, the Privy Council told him that Cromwell and Norfolk wanted to hear what the ambassador had to say. Though Cromwell could not attend a meeting regarding the matter, Chapuys reported to the emperor that Norfolk could not disprove what Chapuys had argued regarding Mary’s poor treatment, but that he needed to pass on the ambassador’s sentiments to those who knew the situation better. Norfolk advised Chapuys to tread carefully when granted an audience with Henry, and it proved to be sage advice.40 This was one of the quintessential moments of Chapuys’s tenure, as it displayed his knowledge of English history, his understanding of ecclesiastical law, and his willingness to face down Henry VIII, all while defending Mary’s rights and honor. It also turned out to be the first instance in which Henry was so irritated with Chapuys that he made a less-than veiled allusion to revoking the ambassador’s station in the kingdom. Chapuys reported he told Henry that, “All the Parliaments could not make the Princess a bastard, for the cognizance of cases concerning legitimacy belonged to ecclesiastical judges. Even if his marriage with the Queen were null, she was legitimate, owning to the lawful ignorance of her parents.”41 Knowing he was not free to address parliament, Chapuys asked Henry if it was possible for Mary to be allowed to live with her mother and to be better treated. The king replied that as Mary’s father, he was better equipped to determine what was best for her and, furthermore, he “might dispose of her as he wishes, without anyone laying down the law to him, and without giving account to anyone.”42 This not only is indicative of Mary’s tenuous status within the kingdom at the time, but the potential risks to her life at play, and further, her father’s attitude toward her as an individual. Henry’s claim came to fruition, in some respects, in April 1534, when Henry and Anne were visiting Elizabeth’s household. With the king’s apparent consent, attendants kept Mary from seeing her father by keeping her in her chamber throughout the two-day visit. Chapuys wrote that what happened to Mary during the visit was worse than prison. Anne’s aunt, Anne Shelton, was Mary’s governess and, according to Chapuys’s dispatch, told Mary, “the King her father did not care in the least that

40 Chapuys to Charles V, Feb. 26, 1534. 41 Chapuys to Charles V, Feb. 26, 1534, 94. 42 Chapuys to Charles V, Feb. 26, 1534, 94.

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she should renounce her title, since by statute she was declared a bastard and incapable; but that if she were in the King’s place, she would kick her out of the King’s house for disobedience, and moreover the King himself has said that he would make her lose her head for violating the laws of his realm.”43 Mary’s physician had reported the incident to Chapuys, telling the ambassador that she had recounted the event to him in Latin so that no others present could understand.44 Chapuys’s own assessment indicated that while he did not believe Henry would harm Mary, those loyal to the Boleyn family were far more likely to do so.45 Although the ambassador repeatedly wrote of plots being devised to end Mary’s life and he never missed an opportunity to suggest or accuse Anne of being the instigator of such plots, there was never direct evidence of such machinations. Chapuys reported another confrontation between Mary and Anne a month earlier. In that instance, Mary insisted that her mother was the only person whom she would ever recognize as queen. In Chapuys’s account, Anne ended the argument acting, “very indignant, and intended to bring down the pride of this unbridled Spanish blood, as she said. She will do the worst she can.”46 The problem with taking this as an accurate portrayal in this supposed argument is that Chapuys left the issue there, and immediately in his next sentence began to write of parliament’s declaration that Catherine could no longer call herself queen and could not retain the items that had been bestowed upon her as queen. That Chapuys shifted focus so quickly suggests that although he might have feared a plot against Mary’s life, he did not consider it a grave enough threat to warrant further elaboration, much less offer a plan of defense. It is here that the line between Chapuys’s role as ambassador and as a personal ally to Mary might have blurred. While he was concerned, the information was little more than a seed to plant in the mind of the emperor to do with what he wished. The ambassador had already suggested military intervention on Mary’s behalf, thus the notion of repeating the request without

43 Chapuys to Charles V, April 22, 44 Chapuys to Charles V, April 22, 45 Chapuys to Charles V, April 22, 46 Chapuys to Charles V, March 7,

1534, L&P, Vol. 7 , 214. 1534, L&P, Vol. 7 , 214. 1534, 214. 1534, L&P, Vol. 7 , 127.

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hard evidence of new activity warranting it would run the risk of diminishing the validity of the earlier proposal suggested by the ambassador and Fisher. Mary was involved in another confrontation later in the month, this time with a member of Elizabeth’s traveling company. At this point, Chapuys wrote that he regretted urging Mary to be so forthright in protesting her situation, and he told Charles that he had consulted Catherine on the matter.47 In this instance, it was Mary who turned what could possibly have been an act of courtesy into a scene. The unnamed member of the traveling company had tried to put her in a carriage to move to a new household along with the rest of Elizabeth’s staff, and Mary strongly protested. “She made a public protest of the compulsion used, and that her act should not prejudice her right and title,” Chapuys wrote.48 This is one of the few instances in which Chapuys suggested that Mary’s response overshadowed the perceived slight. It was not the last time she would act in such a manner. In June 1534, Mary sent a letter of protest to numerous foreign officials including Chapuys and Charles V. Written in Latin, the letter included a sentence that translates to, “To clarify all the details of this Scripture we have, we say, we maintain, assert, and protest that our identity is a mere fact of our knowledge and after mature deliberation on the testimony of my manual, a sign and a seal of my own.”49 Through this, Mary was insisting to the world outside of England that in no way did she intend to renounce her title or give in to the pressures to marry or enter a convent without the consent of her mother. This in itself could easily have been interpreted as treason enough to warrant her execution. As it turned out, Chapuys had actually written the letter and gave it to Catherine to pass along to Mary to rewrite, copy, sign, and distribute ten months earlier.50 The same dispatch in which Chapuys explains this scenario to Charles includes yet

47 Chapuys to Charles V, March 30, 1534, L&P, Vol. 7 , 165. 48 Chapuys to Charles V, March 30, 1534, 165. 49 The Princess Mary, June 7, 1534, L&P, Vol. 7 , 308. Translation by the author (“Ita

ut universa et singular in hac scriptura habentur, dicimus, narramus, asserimus, asseveramus ac pretestamur de mera nostra Scientia ac matura deliberation, teste meo manuali signo et sigillo meo.”). 50 Chapuys to Charles V, June 23, 1534, L&P, Vol. 7 , 323.

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another suggestion that Anne was intending to have Mary killed in July of that year, when Henry had planned to visit France.51 It is, however, difficult to tell for certain how much of Chapuys’s sensitivity to Mary’s precarious position was due to his own interpretation of events. Much of the flair added to his explanation of incidents could have come from Catherine, or at least his understandings of those events could have been to seem more severe due to Catherine’s input. At issue is that little is known about the order in which news traveled between these three individuals. In a letter Chapuys wrote to Charles dated February 9, 1535, it appears Catherine contacted Chapuys through her physician to inform the ambassador that, once again, Mary was being threatened with execution or lifetime imprisonment if she did not soon acquiesce and swear to the Act of Supremacy.52 This adds another potential variable to the conveyance and accurate reporting of facts in the form of Catherine’s physician, and Mary’s earlier passage of information through her own doctor should also be considered with regard to how the record as revealed through epistolary documentation can be less than objectively reliable. While historical accuracy is perhaps lessened or lost through these letters, they reveal significant elements of the personalities at play in these scenarios. Of course, the primary personality revealed here is that of Chapuys, but it is through his accounts that we are at least able to see what at least one diplomat, and one with greater access to her than any other, thought of her in this era. Mary sought Charles’ aid through Chapuys in early 1535, her goal to have Charles ask the king directly to allow her to live with her mother. Several physicians who had attended Mary had concluded her recurring poor health was due to what today would perhaps classify as depression, and these physicians added that if she would be allowed to stay with Catherine, much of the situation would possibly alleviate itself.53 Chapuys tried to intercede on her behalf, and Henry was reportedly gracious in hearing Mary’s case. However, the king said he could not allow such a move, because Mary was at that time betrothed to the Dauphin of France. The risk of Catherine taking her out of England in secret to avoid this match was too great. Charles V, meanwhile, said nothing to the king of

51 Chapuys to Charles V, June 23, 1534, 323. 52 Chapuys to Charles V, Feb. 9, 1535, L&P, Vol. 8, 66. 53 Chapuys to Charles V, Feb. 25, 1535, L&P, Vol. 8, 100.

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this matter.54 In this instance, the portrayal of Charles as Mary’s protector is somewhat misleading, as it was Chapuys who operated, largely on his own accord, while the emperor refused to act. It is indicative of the ways in which Chapuys, more than Charles, was Mary’s staunchest defender, even if he did not have the power Charles possessed. Chapuys and Mary communicated on a regular basis by the middle of 1535, and their clandestine communication shows that the relationship was important enough to both to risk the potentially harsh result of it being discovered. Henry’s prior statements threatening to expel Chapuys from the kingdom, and even more dangerous, his assertion that he was not above removing his daughter’s head attest to this. Unfortunately, it is in part due to this correspondence being passed in secret that it has been lost, and most evidence of it can only be located in Chapuys’s dispatches that summarize the letters. A letter dated August 3, 1535 shows that Henry was taking greater care to control Chapuys’s access to Mary. “I have not yet wished to go to the chase, nor do I know that leave would be given me to visit the Princess, seeing that the chase is round about her, and that I am not allowed to send my men to her,” Chapuys wrote.55 At other times, such as in September 1535, Henry declined to grant Chapuys leave to visit her on account of her poor health and an episode of plague sweeping through the region. Cromwell wrote to Chapuys that month, and noted that the king would like Chapuys to delay his visit until the plague passed. It was during this period that Chapuys called Mary a “paragon of beauty, goodness, and virtue” in a letter to imperial advisor Nicolas Perrenot de Granvelle.56 This is at varying level of odds with the traditional depiction of Catholic Mary as the punisher, the “Bloody Mary” of Protestant lore and subsequent Whig history, but at the same time much of this history is reflective of her time as queen. Writing of Mary’s accession, Whitelock notes that Mary’s bright eyes and red hair helped make her a “striking figure” even though her features showed the ill effects of a lifetime of poor health.57 Chapuys’s description, of course, is of a woman almost twenty years younger, before the strains of time had

54 Chapuys to Charles V, Feb. 25, 1535, 100. 55 Chapuys to Charles V, Aug. 3, 1535, L&P, Vol. 9, 5. 56 Chapuys to Nicolas Granvelle, March 23, 1535, L&P, Vol. 8, 169. 57 Whitelock, Princess, Bastard, Queen, 187.

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much opportunity to show themselves. Her piety has never been called into question by objective historians. Although Henry diminished Mary’s household and eventually moved her into a house she shared with Elizabeth, the king was always mindful of his eldest daughter’s intermittent health issues regarding her menstrual cycle, and although he forbade Mary and Catherine to correspond, evidence shows that he was not keen on enforcing that order.58 It was in this area that Chapuys served as a conduit between the Lady Mary and her mother. There were few people better qualified by that point to serve in such a role. As such, Chapuys’s accounts of the interaction between the two women are arguably the best source of the relationship between Mary and her mother during this period. Chapuys wrote the emperor on September 6, 1535 that he, “sent lately a servant to request the King to send his physician to the Princess, both on account of a certain rheum, and to provide against a return of her ordinary complain(t), which she dreads, in the coming winter.”59 Mary’s menstrual problems had plagued her since the onset of adolescence. By the time she was nineteen she was using Chapuys and his chosen representatives as messengers to speak to her father regarding them. It was not the first time Mary’s menstrual complications were the focus of conversation between Chapuys and the king. The ambassador had previously taken the opportunity to chastise Henry about his treatment of Mary and its negative effect on her health.60 This is an area in which Cromwell could have been helpful to Mary’s cause, at least in the way Chapuys represents the story. The more Chapuys pushed for a favorable change of lodging for Mary, the more it alerted Henry that something of which he would not approve was afoot. Cromwell’s involvement, however, might have potentially allowed Chapuys greater leeway to plan an escape attempt, which had become an increasingly popular idea among Charles V and his advisors since the beginning of 1535. Though they were friends, Chapuys grew suspicious of Cromwell during the year, often due to conflicting information he received that contradicted Cromwell’s professed allegiance to Mary. This was part of a match of wits between the two men, and while Chapuys grew frustrated with Cromwell, there was no person in England other

58 Loades, Mary Tudor: A Life, 64. 59 Chapuys to Charles V, Sept. 6, 1535, L&P, Vol. 9, 96. 60 Chapuys to Charles V, Feb. 9, 1535, L&P, Vol. 8, 66.

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than Mary for whom Chapuys exhibited such a consistently positive opinion in his letters. A plot to sweep Mary out of England in early 1536 was called off due to Catherine’s death. Chapuys wrote that he feared for Mary’s wellbeing in the wake of it. Although he found the news of Catherine’s death “cruel” and “painful,” his concern and grief were more for Mary than anyone.61 “I fear the good Princess her daughter will die of grief, or else that the King’s concubine will hasten what she has long threatened to do, viz., to kill her,” he wrote.62 This could have been another of Chapuys’s attempts to instigate military intervention from the Holy Roman Empire, but it is also possible that his affection for and devotion to Mary led him to sincerely believe she would succumb to depression in the wake of her mother’s death. Chapuys suggested to Mary during this time that she become a nun in order to remove her from the stress she had long experienced and the dangers both she and the ambassador believed her to be facing.63 This is indicative of the extreme impact Catherine’s death had upon her daughter. At this point, issues of legitimacy and of Mary’s place in the succession were cast aside. What was paramount to Chapuys at this stage was her mere survival. The execution of Anne Boleyn in May 1536 removed the immediate threat to the princess, whether real or received. Still, little in Mary’s life immediately changed. Perhaps the most important and lasting action Chapuys took in Mary’s life was convincing her to finally sign her name to a statement in June that acknowledged her father as head of the Church while accepting her own illegitimacy, even though he had previously agreed with and even celebrated her refusal to do so. The move did a great deal in terms of reconciling Mary and the king, and their relationship began to thaw quickly after she signed. However, Mary felt she was betraying her beliefs and felt guilty about the decision.64 Meanwhile, Chapuys’s advice to Mary in this matter also produced professional difficulties for the ambassador. Mary begged him to seek a papal dispensation to ease her conscience for what she had done, and Chapuys explained to the emperor that her acceptance of the Act of Supremacy was part

61 Chapuys to Charles V, Jan. 9, 1536, L&P. Vol. 10, 21. 62 Chapuys to Charles V, Jan. 9, 1536, 21. 63 Chapuys to Charles V, Jan. 29, 1536, L&P, Vol. 10, 69. 64 Princess Mary to Cromwell, June 13, 1536, L&P, Vol. 10, 473–474.

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of a larger strategy to restore her status, and thus increase her potential political power.65 Neither she nor Chapuys were happy with how it was obtained, but a utilitarian view indicates that it was the prudent move for her to make. By 1542, Mary had made a permanent return to court under her father’s reign, and Chapuys was reporting news regarding Mary more frequently to Queen Mary of Hungary than to Charles V. The emperor had turned over considerable authority in the empire to his sister, and she was not unfamiliar with the situation in England, having received updates from the princess herself since the younger Mary’s teenage years. Most commonly, Chapuys’s letters to the queen contained updates on Mary’s health, which continued to cause problems for her throughout her life.66 Updates regarding the potential match between the princess and the Duke of Orleans were a common topic of this correspondence, as well, suggesting that Mary of Hungary had assumed a role of consultation and even guidance in matters regarding Mary as she navigated early adulthood. Chapuys has most frequently been viewed by historians as a key source for understanding Henry VIII’s pursuit of an annulment and the Anne Boleyn era of his reign, even though Chapuys remained in England in the service of the Holy Roman Empire until just before Henry’s death. However, what is of equal value in Chapuys’s correspondence is his portrayal of Mary through the course of her father’s reign. This correspondence, as emotional as it often was, provides a window through which we can see Mary’s development as well as her reaction to her father’s decisions and actions, even if the window includes a screen represented by Chapuys’s interpretations of Mary’s view. In the process of assessing Chapuys’s writing, we can see a young woman navigate the volatile political landscape of 1530s England as a potential ruler of the kingdom and as a daughter who had been cast aside for reasons not of her own making. Ultimately, Chapuys provides the most complete third-person account of Mary’s life from early adolescence until the late 1530s. This highlights the importance of third-party correspondence and private writing in the construction of our understanding of the period and the persons living within it. Perhaps more importantly, it indicates

65 Chapuys to Charles V, June 6, 1536, L&P, Vol. 10, 444–446. 66 Chapuys to Mary of Hungary, Apr. 30, 1542, L&P, Vol. 17 , 155.

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that sources that become attached to particular historiographies should not go unmined as potential troves of information about other persons and events.

Bibliography Primary Sources Calendar of State Papers: Spain, Volume 4, Part 1. Calendar of State Papers: Spain, Volume 4, Part 2. Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Volume 6. Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Volume 7 . Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Volume 8. Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Volume 9. Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Volume 10. Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Volume 11. Letter and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Volume 17 .

Secondary Sources Beem, Charles. The Lioness Roared: The Problems of Female Rule in English History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Dickens, A.G. The English Reformation (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, Second Edition, 1989). Freeman, Thomas S. “Inventing Bloody Mary: Perceptions of Mary Tudor from the Restoration to the Twentieth Century,” in Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman, eds., Mary Tudor: Old and New Perspectives (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Grant, Tessa. “’Thus Like a Nun, Not Like a Princess Born’: Dramatic Representations of Mary Tudor in the Early Years of the Seventeenth Century,” in Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman, eds., Mary Tudor: Old and New Perspectives (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Haigh, Christopher. “Dickens and the English Reformation,” Historical Research No. 77 (2004), 24–38. Hamrick, Stephen. “‘His wel beloved doughter Lady Mary’: Representing Mary Tudor in 1534,” Renaissance Studies Vol. 31, No. 4 (September 2017), 497– 518. Houlebrooke, Ralph A. The English Family 1450–1700 (London: Routledge, 1984). Levine, Mortimer. Tudor Dynastic Problems, 1460–1571 (New York: Allen & Unwin, 1975).

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Loades, David. Mary Tudor: A Life (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, Second Edition, 1992). Mackay, Lauren. Inside the Tudor Court: Henry VIII and His Six Wives Through the Writings of the Spanish Ambassador, Eustace Chapuys (London: Amberley, 2014). Pollintz, Aysha. “Religion and Translation at the Court of Henry VIII: Princess Mary, Katherine Parr, and the Paraphrases of Erasmus,” in Doran and Freeman, eds., Mary Tudor: Old and New Perspectives (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Schutte, Valerie. “Under the Influence: The Impact of Queenly Book Dedications on Princess Mary,” in Sarah Duncan and Valerie Schutte, eds., The Birth of a Queen: Essays on the Quincentenary of Mary I (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Warnicke, Retha M. The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Whitelock, Anna. Mary Tudor: Princess, Bastard, Queen (New York: Random House, 2009).

Imperial Meddler/Marian Mentor: Eustace Chapuys and Mary Tudor in Film and Television William B. Robison

Introduction Eustace Chapuys, Charles V’s ambassador to England 1529–45, was a key figure in Anglo-Imperial diplomacy and the life of Mary, eldest child of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon and Queen of England 1553– 58. Though he is best known for his antagonism to Anne Boleyn, the years of his residency were formative for Mary, who was successively heir apparent, statutory bastard, and second in line to the throne, saw

Film is shorthand here for film and television. Limits on space prevent full bibliographic citation of individual films, but all are in the Internet Movie Database (https://www.imdb.com/) and, except as otherwise noted, available on DVD or Blu-ray; for filmography and analysis of all pre-2012 releases discussed here, see the appropriate alphabetical entries in Sue Parrill and William B. Robison, The Tudors on Film and Television (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012). W. B. Robison (B) Southeastern Louisiana University, Hammond, LA, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 V. Schutte and J. S. Hower (eds.), Writing Mary I, Queenship and Power, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95132-0_3

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her father divorce her mother and reject the Catholic Church, suffered internal exile, poor health, and emotional distress, and remained unwed despite several betrothals. Chapuys gave Mary and Catherine aid and comfort, tried to prevent the divorce and the break with Rome, covertly encouraged dissent on their behalf, attempted to arrange Mary’s escape, persuaded her to submit to Henry and return to court after Catherine’s death in 1536, and mentored her until his departure. In turn, Mary and Catherine were among the few who offered him friendship uncompromised by secrecy and a hostile agenda.1 Yet, if Mary and Chapuys’s lives were interwoven with those of Tudor figures prominent in film, neither gets the high-profile roles that, for better or worse, shape popular perceptions of Henry, Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth I, and Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, and filmmakers prefer more marketable topics like the Henry-Catherine-Anne love triangle and Elizabeth’s romances and conflicts with Mary Stuart and Philip II of Spain.2 Both Mary and Chapuys debuted in 1911 but since have appeared sporadically and almost always separately. Most films set in Henry’s reign limit them to minor, often unfavorable roles or ignore them. Both are in the BBC’s The Six Wives of Henry VIII (1970), the film H enry VIII and His Six Wives (1972), and the BBC’s Wolf Hall (2015), but only in The Tudors (2007–10) do they share scenes. Films set after 1545 necessarily exclude Chapuys, but most retroactively cast a pall over Mary’s earlier life by portraying her reign as a dark Catholic interlude between her Protestant siblings Edward VI and Elizabeth. She has the title role only in obscure foreign films and The Twisted Tale of Bloody Mary (2008).3 1 John Edwards, Mary I: England’s Catholic Queen (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011) is the latest scholarly biography, and at last there is one for Chapuys, Lauren Mackay, Inside the Tudor Court: Henry VIII and His Six Wives Through the Writings of the Spanish Ambassador Eustace Chapuys (Stroud: Amberley Publishing, 2014). 2 William B. Robison, “Stripped of Their Altars: Film, Faith, and Tudor Royal Women from the Silent Era to the Twenty-First Century, 1895–2014,” in Julie A. Chappell and Kaley A. Kramer, eds., Women During the English Reformations: Renegotiating Gender and Religious Identity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 146–55. 3 Victor Hugo, Marie Tudor (1833), accessed 18 Feb. 2021, https://www.gutenb erg.org/files/39133/39133-h/39133-h.htm, likely inspired the lost 1911 Italian film in which Mary debuted and definitely French films 1912, 1915, 1966 and German 1920, 1977 (no DVDs); Chapuys first appeared in the lost 1911 adaptation of William Shakespeare’s The Famous Life of King Henry the Eight (c.1613), and later 1979, 2012; Henry VIII , Folger Shakespeare Library, ed. Barbara A. Mowat (New York: Washington Square Press, 2007), 181–87. Mary also appears in Anna Boleyn (1920), The Tudor Rose (1936),

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Filmmakers, slow to assimilate new scholarship and relying on traditional historiography and earlier films, typically minimize Mary’s achievements and ignore Chapuys’s diplomatic skill.4 That is partly artistic choice, but time is also a factor. Mary had the shortest Tudor reign and died at forty-two, while Chapuys was in England less than fifteen years, a third of which Mary was not at court. Filmmakers had little need for subplots employing secondary characters before the vogue for miniseries in the 1970s. However, Six Wives is nine hours, Wolf Hall six, and The Tudors thirty-five, so there is room for Mary and Chapuys, who are not the main characters after all. The following sections analyze neglect of Mary and Chapuys in the twentieth century and the exception Six Wives, examine the disparate ways Michael Hirst depicts them in screenplays for Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth (1998) and Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007) and his own The Tudors , and compare their treatment in Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy—Wolf Hall (2009), Bring Up the Bodies (2012), and The Mirror and the Light (2020)—and Peter Kosminsky’s miniseries.5

The Twentieth Century Mary and Chapuys were long on the wrong side of history. John Knox attacked Mary in The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558),6 and Protestant writers from John Foxe on vilified them. Providentialism, which long informed accounts of the Young Bess (1953), The Prince and the Pauper (1960, 1962, 1971, 1997), Elizabeth R (1971), Henry VIII (2003), Lady Jane (1986), Elizabeth (1998), The Other Boleyn Girl (2003, 2008), Elizabeth I the Virgin Queen (2006), Chapuys in Henry VIII (1911, 1979) and A Man for All Seasons (1964 [2], 1988). 4 Filmmakers’ trope-mining is a recurrent theme in Thomas Betteridge, “A Queen for All Seasons: Elizabeth I on Film,” in Doran and Freeman, eds., Myth of Elizabeth, 242–59; Parrill and Robison, Tudors on Film and Television. 5 All London: Fourth Estate; cf. Lauren Mackay, Wolf Hall Companion: The People, the Places, the History (London: Batsford, 2020). 6 John Knox, The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (Geneva, 1558), accessed 19 Feb. 2021, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/9660/9660h/9660-h.htm.

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English Reformation, accorded Elizabeth unique reverence but its selective misogynist streak led to condemnation of Mary I, Catherine de Medici, Marie of Guise, and Mary Stuart as Catholics, buttressed by popular obsession with the temptations of Eve and unscientific beliefs about female physiology, sexuality, and reproduction.7 Elizabeth muted criticism by boasting of “the heart and stomach of a king,” “marrying” England, defeating the Spanish Armada, and preserving the Church. Mary assimilated male traits, but Elizabeth had better luck.8 Modern historians often accuse Mary of contributing to a mid-Tudor crisis and Chapuys of failing to rescue her. Her twentieth-century biographers H.M.F. Prescott and David Loades are critical, J.A. Froude and A.F. Pollard call her “hysterical,” G.R. Elton “stupid,” and Loades “weak,” A.G. Dickens stresses the futility of Mary’s Catholic revival, and W.D. Jones synthesizes these assessments in The Mid-Tudor Crisis, 1539–1563 (1973).9 Chapuys has no twentieth-century biographer, but scholars regard him as unreliable.10 However, revisionists Jennifer Loach, Robert Tittler, and Ann Weikel emphasize the Marian regime’s competence, Eamon Duffy and Christopher Haigh argue for Catholic vitality, biographies by Linda Porter, Judith Richards, and Anna Whitelock address gender, Jonathan Edwards has a new volume in the Yale Monarchs

7 This not the place for an extended discussion of Marian historiography; therefore, see ‘Introduction,’ in Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman, eds., Mary Tudor: Old and New Perspectives (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 1–20; Retha Warnicke, “Mary I, Queen of England: Historiographical Essay, 2006 to the Present,” in Sarah Duncan and Valerie Schutte, eds., The Birth of a Queen: Essays on the Quincentenary of Mary I (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 255–72; the essays in those volumes and Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman, The Myth of Elizabeth (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) shed much additional light on providentialism and other aspects of historiography. 8 Carole Levin, The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth and the Politics of Sex and Power, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), especially Chapter 6; William B. Robison, “Bad Girl, Bad Mother, Bad Queen: Catherine de’ Medici in Fiction, Film, and History” in Julie A. Chappell and Mallory Young, eds., Bad Girls and Transgressive Women in Popular Television, Fiction, and Film (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 159–82. 9 H.M.F. Prescott, Mary Tudor (London: Constable, 1940); David Loades, Mary Tudor: A Life (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989); Doran and Freeman, Mary Tudor, 8–9; Whitney R. D. Jones, The Mid-Tudor Crisis 1539–1563 (London: Macmillan, 1973). 10 Lauren Mackay, Inside the Tudor Court: Henry VIII and His Six Wives Through the Writings of the Spanish Ambassador Eustace Chapuys (Stroud: Amberley Publishing, 2014), 8–13.

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Series, and scores of new essays provide a more well-rounded picture.11 Mary cannot escape blame for burning Protestants and allowing Philip to involve England in an unnecessary war, but her achievements and persistent English Catholicism suggest she might have succeeded had she lived longer.12 Lauren Mackay has rehabilitated Chapuys as both a source and a historical actor.13 For decades Mary and Chapuys did not suit filmmakers’ purposes. They cannot advance the Protestant nationalist narratives common in British historical films or assume propaganda roles like Charles Laughton’s Henry in The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933) and Flora Robson’s Elizabeth in Fire Over England (1937), where Charles V and Philip II,

11 Jennifer Loach and Robert Tittler, eds., The Mid-Tudor Polity c.1540–1560 (London: Macmillan, 1980); Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580. 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005); Christopher Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Eamon Duffy and David Loades, eds., The Church of Mary Tudor (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006); Linda Porter, Mary Tudor: The First Queen (London: Portrait, 2007); Judith Richards, Mary Tudor (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008); Anna Whitelock, Mary Tudor: England’s First Queen (London: Bloomsbury, 2009); Edwards, Mary I ; Doran and Freeman, Mary Tudor; Duncan and Schutte, The Birth of a Queen. 12 Eamon Duffy, Fires of Faith: Catholic England Under Mary Tudor (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010) should be set against Andrew Pettegree, Marian Protestantism: Six Studies (Berkeley: Scolar Press, 1996). 13 Mackay, Inside the Tudor Court; cf. Richard Lundell, “Renaissance Diplomacy and the Limits of Empire: Eustace Chapuys, Habsburg Imperialisms, and Dissimulation as Method,” in Tonio Andrade and William Reger, eds., The Limits of Empire: European Imperial Formations in Early Modern World History: Essays in Honor of Geoffrey Parker (London: Routledge, 2012), 205–22; Susan Bordo, The Creation of Anne Boleyn: A New Look at England’s Most Notorious Queen (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), Chapter 12: “Chapuys’ Revenge.”

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respectively, are analogs for Hitler.14 Given that Laughton’s iconic performance in Private Life, the first Tudor sound film, has shaped Henry’s image ever since, the absence of Catherine, Mary, and Chapuys may be similarly, if negatively, influential, influencing subsequent filmmakers to ignore them.15 Nor can Mary and Chapuys play romantic leads like Henry, Elizabeth, and Mary Stuart. Mary Tudor, shrewish onscreen, shares her mother’s drab filmic fate. If Catherine was the dowdy old queen who stood between Henry and Anne, Mary was the bloody old queen who stood between England and Elizabeth. Chapuys as a clergyman was technically celibate but had an illegitimate son Cesare.16 Mary and Chapuys are unhelpful with civil rights and feminist themes like those in film adaptations of Maxwell Anderson’s play Anne of the Thousand Days (1948) and Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons (1954). In Bolt’s play, Chapuys’s exchanges with More emphasize the latter’s reputation for careful argument, clever repartee, incorruptibility, and a commitment to individual liberty that is anachronistic and at odds with his persecution of heretics. Chapuys is just a venal counterpoint to saintly Thomas, like Henry and his ministers. Fred Zinnemann, who made his awardwinning 1966 film during the civil rights movement, perhaps excluded Chapuys to focus on the principled martyrdom of Paul Scofield’s More. Charlton Heston’s 1988 TNT production restores most of the passages involving Chapuys (Nicholas Amer), but despite their closeness to More, neither Mary nor Catherine appears in the play or any of the films, and Anne Boleyn (Vanessa Redgrave) has only a cameo in Zinnemann’s

14 Philip serves the same function in Drake of England (1935), The Lion Has Wings (1939), and The Sea Hawk (1940), and the battle continued postwar in the television series Sir Francis Drake (1961–62), the film Seven Seas to Calais (1962), the BBC miniseries Elizabeth R (1971), HBO’s Elizabeth I (2005), the BCC miniseries Elizabeth I the Virgin Queen (2005), and Kapur’s Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007); Will Coster, “The Armada, War and Propaganda in the Cinema,” in Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman, eds., Tudors and Stuarts on Film: Historical Perspectives (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 150–63; William B. Robison, “Lancastrians, Tudors, and World War II: British and German Historical Films as Propaganda, 1933–1945,” Arts 9/3 (10 August 2020), accessed 19 Feb. 2021, https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0752/9/3/88; Walker, The Private Life of Henry VIII , 50–65. 15 Thomas S. Freeman, “A Tyrant for All Seasons: Henry VIII on Film,” in Doran and Freeman, Tudors and Stuarts on Film, 30–45; Walker, The Private Life of Henry VIII , passim; cf. John Fleet’s documentary, Churchill and the Movie Mogul (2019). 16 Mackay, Inside the Tudor Court, 24–25.

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film, leaving More’s daughter Margaret (Susannah York 1966, Adrienne Thomas 1988) to represent female empowerment.17 Neither Mary nor Chapuys is in Maxwell Anderson’s Anne of the Thousand Days . Charles Jarrott’s 1969 film adaptation, which shows feminist influence, allowed Mary (Nicola Pagett) a tiny part but gave Catherine (Irene Papas) and Anne (Genevieve Bujold) the strong female roles and assigned Chapuys’s function to Mendoza (Vernon Dobtcheff). Mary is caught between agency and victimhood. When Mendoza tells the dying Catherine there is no word from Henry (Richard Burton), she laments, “How can he utterly forget so much?” Mary, who was not present in reality, bitterly observes, “He does not forget, mother, he just has no wish to remember. But rumors from court say that all is not well with him. Still no sign of a son. That woman is in despair, they say, for already my beloved father’s eye has started to wander again.” Catherine sighs, “Poor Hal,” and an incredulous Mary exclaims, “You pity him!” But this leads nowhere in plot terms.18 The Six Wives of Henry VIII (1970), starring Keith Michell, is the first production to cover the king’s life from boyhood to death. Now a venerable classic, it had a modest budget and relied on good writing and acting for its success. However, it has six ninety-minute episodes, one per queen regardless of how long they were married and each with a different writer; therefore, Mary and Chapuys do not have consistent roles throughout. Also, if ninety minutes is too short for Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn, it is too long for the other wives. This might have given Mary and Chapuys more screen time, but both appear—not 17 Chapuys was probably not in Bolt’s 1954 radio play, was not in the 1957 television show, was in 1960 East End and 1961 Broadway productions, two 1964 television shows, and TNT’s 1988 teleplay (only 1966 and 1988 are on DVD); Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons (New York: Vintage, 1962), 15–16, 21–24, 48–51, 53–54, 61–64; analogously, Mary is in Mark Twain’s The Prince in Pauper (1881) and the 1960, 1962, 1971, 1997 films but not those from 1909, 1915, 1920, 1937, 1943, 1957, 1976, 1977 (Crossed Swords ), and 2000; Peter Marshall, “Saints and Cinemas: A Man for All Seasons,” in Doran, Susan, and Thomas S. Freeman, eds., Tudors and Stuart on Film: Historical Perspectives. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, 46–59; on Margaret, John Guy, A Daughter’s Love: Thomas More and His Dearest Meg (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009). 18 Maxwell Anderson, Anne of the Thousand Days (New York: William Sloane, 1948); on the film’s feminist elements, Glenn Richardson, “Anne of the Thousand Days,” in Doran and Freeman, Tudors and Stuarts on Film, 60–75, and Susan Bordo, Creation of Anne Boleyn, Chapter 10.

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together—only in Episodes One and Six and Mary in Episode Three. Even with nine hours, neither had sufficient status to get a major role. Still, it gives them more screen time and treats them more favorably than its predecessors. In Episode One, Henry and the child Mary (Verina Greenlaw) cheerfully discuss More’s Utopia in Latin, an unusually positive depiction of their relationship and intriguing because More is not a character in the series. Chapuys (Edward Atienza) brings Catherine news, urges her to lead a rebellion, warns Henry the emperor may invade England, pleads with him to let Mary see Catherine (Annette Crosbie), attends the dying queen, and praises her courage, all accurate but not involving Mary. In Episode Three, Henry and Jane Seymour (Anne Stallybrass) welcome the adult Mary (Alison Frazer) back to court, she faints, and her father comforts her. With conflicting loyalties to church and kin, she prays to the Virgin for forgiveness, rides with Jane, and wins money gambling with her father. When Jane dies, Mary keeps vigil, but Henry takes her place when she has a toothache. In Episode Six, Chapuys is at court when Henry proposes to Catherine Parr (Rosalie Crutchley), urges him to enforce the conservative Six Articles, and discusses with Bishop Stephen Gardiner (Basil Dignam) the king’s invasion of France, recent burnings of heretics, and the queen’s possession of heterodox books. Finally, Mary agrees to Henry’s request that she recognize her brother Edward as king.19 Equal in length and otherwise admirable, Elizabeth R (1971) devotes much of its Episode One to conflict between Elizabeth (Glenda Jackson) and Mary (Daphne Slater), reverting to a portrayal of the latter as paranoid and cruel. The film Henry VIII and His Six Wives (1972) shows Henry frolicking with little Mary, and Chapuys (Nicholas Amer) at a masque Anne Boleyn (Charlotte Rampling) stages to ridicule Wolsey (John Bryans), bringing Henry news that Catherine of Aragon (Frances Cuka) has died, and sending musicians to reconcile the king to an older Mary (Sarah Long). She submits to a gracious king, is cheerful when Edward is born, and appears at Henry’s dying bedside, but these scenes give little clue as to her character. Chapuys is just a diplomat. Subsequently, there was a hiatus in major Tudor films except Trevor 19 See The Six Wives of Henry VIII (1970), DVD: BBC Tudors Collection, 2011, for additional details not in P&R.

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Nunn’s Lady Jane (1986), Henry VIII (1979), and Heston’s A Man for all Seasons (1988). Lady Jane features a kinder, gentler Mary (Jane Lapotaire), who hopes to spare Jane (Helena Bonham Carter) and Guildford Dudley (Cary Elwes) but has them executed after Renard (Lee Montague) tells her Philip will not come to England until she does. As Carolyn Colbert notes, they die not because of Wyatt’s Rebellion but so Mary can get married. It is tempting to see revisionism’s influence here, but for years it bore no more fruit.20

Kapur, Hirst, and a New Wave Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth and John Madden’s Shakespeare in Love began a new wave of Tudor films in 1998, but Mary and Chapuys were not initially beneficiaries. Ray Winstone’s Henry VIII turns Mary into a sullen victim, Elizabeth I the Virgin Queen makes her paranoid, self-pitying, and vicious, The Other Boleyn Girl give her no lines, The Twisted Tale of Bloody Mary is irredeemably awful, and none include Chapuys. Elizabeth, Elizabeth: The Golden Age, and Henry VIII are, as Pete Travis put it, “The Godfather in tights,” and increased violence means viewers see heretics burning in extended gruesome detail, enhancing Mary’s “bloody” image.21 What Kapur’s Elizabeth and Elizabeth: The Golden Age have in common with The Tudors is Michael Hirst, screenwriter for Kapur and creator of the Showtime series. Christopher Haigh’s comment about the first Kapur film also applies to The Tudors : it “was not made in ignorance. You have to know a lot of... history to make these mistakes.” But Hirst has no consistent vision of Mary. Kapur’s films are anti-Catholic and antiIslamic, with Catholic clergy resembling radical Muslim imams.22 The first opens with the burning of Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley and

20 Carolyn Colbert, “Well, then... Hail Mary”: Mary in The Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyatt (1607) and Lady Jane (1986), in Duncan and Schutte, Birth of a Queen, 215–32. 21 Christopher Haigh, “Kapur’s Elizabeth,” and Vivienne Westbrook, “Elizabeth: The Golden Age: A Sign of the Times?,” in Doran and Freeman, Tudors and Stuarts on Film, 129, 167; Suzannah Lipscomb, “Henry VIII: A King Caught on Camera,” History Today (22 Mar. 2016), accessed 01 May 2021, https://www.historytoday.com/making-history/ henry-viii-king-caught-camera. 22 Haigh, “Kapur’s Elizabeth,” 132–33; Westbrook, Elizabeth: The Golden Age, 167.

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later shows a Marian court, dressed in black in near darkness, surrounding a grotesque and dying Mary. In the second, a misshapen black-clad Philip bent on conquest parallels Mary’s role in the first and implicates her in the Black Legend, which equates Spanish-ness with cruelty and superstition. These two films present darker images of Mary and Philip than any of their predecessors.23 The Tudors brings Mary and Chapuys out of the shadows. Though scholars rightly criticize it as salacious, inaccurate, and heedless of chronology, it offers a more nuanced characterization of both. Sarah Bolger gives Mary depth and complexity as tragic life transforms her from a wistfully sweet girl to a frighteningly cold-blooded woman. Anthony Brophy as Chapuys is a kind mentor to Mary even if a conniving diplomat otherwise. Catherine of Aragon has a larger part than usual, so it would have been implausible to give Mary a minimal role, and with both Catherine and Mary as major characters, Chapuys is essential. In Seasons One and Two, Maria Doyle Kennedy as Catherine of Aragon and Natalie Dormer as Anne Boleyn are strong women, deliver powerful performances, and create real tension, even if the story deviates from history. As Mary, Bláthnaid McKeown is cute in Season One, but Sarah Bolger is a force in Seasons Two–Four. The typical emphasis on the love triangle of Henry, Catherine, and Anne might have marginalized Mary, but instead she shares Catherine and Anne’s female empowerment.24 Bolger’s Mary benefits from Kennedy’s dignity as Catherine and from Dormer’s demand that Hirst make Anne more than a sex object. Like Catherine, Mary refuses to acknowledge the break with Rome or the king’s decision to strip her of her title and place in the succession. Like Anne, she protects her virtue, though without all the flirtation. Like 23 William S. Maltby, The Black Legend in England: The Development of Anti-Spanish Sentiment 1558–1660 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1971); William B. Robison, “Marrying Mary to the Black Legend: Anti-Catholicism and Anti-Marian Messages in Anglo-American Films About Philip II,” in Sarah Duncan and Valerie Schutte, eds., The Birth of a Queen: Essays on the Quincentenary of Mary I (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 233–54. 24 The Tudors is so rife with errors that it is impossible to list even those concerning Mary and Chapuys. For that and critical analysis, see William B. Robison, ed., History, Fiction, and ‘The Tudors’: Sex, Politics, Power, and Artistic License in the Showtime Series (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), particularly Carole Levin and Estelle Paranque, “The Significance of the King’s Children in The Tudors,” 115–26 on Henry and his children; for a lengthy plot summary and analysis, see Parrill and Robison, Tudors on Film and Television, 247–90.

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Catherine of Aragon, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, and Catherine Parr, Mary has no sex scenes, is never partially clothed, and largely escapes the systemic misogyny that Megan Hickerson so devastatingly critiques.25 Her most risqué moment is a kiss with Philip of Bavaria, though in an egregiously adolescent attempt at humor, Francis Bryan asks if she has heard of the game cunnilingus. Oddly for such a hypersexual series, absence of nudity seems to symbolize greater virtue. Casting Bolger as Mary may be a concession to the use of “beautiful people,” but she is one of a group of women who are not sexualized. Nor does Chapuys share the sexually predatory nature of males like Brandon, Bryan, and Henry. After Catherine and Anne’s deaths, the last two seasons rely on fictitious trysts involving real people, like Thomas Seymour’s affair with sister-inlaw Anne Stanhope, and fictional characters like Lady Ursula Missledon. Therefore, Mary and Chapuys are a welcome dose of reality. An important reason for their higher profile is the emphasis on marital politics, not only with Henry but also his fictionalized sister Margaret (a combination of Margaret and her sister Mary) and his children, of whom Mary is the eldest and most frequently betrothed. Mary’s marriage is constantly in the offing, and once at court Chapuys is usually on hand to arrange or prevent it, depending on whether the intended groom is Imperial or French. At the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520, Mary meets her fiancé the Dauphin, kisses him, and knocks him down when he reacts badly. When Chapuys and Mendoza arrive at court—together and too early—Wolsey proposes a marriage between Charles V and Mary. When Charles repudiates his betrothal, Henry and Wolsey arrange for her to marry Henri, Duke of Orleans with equal lack of success. In Season Two, Anne brings up Elizabeth’s marriage and Henry retorts that Mary is not married yet. In Season Three, Mary is caught up in Cromwell’s wooing of first the Protestant League of Schmalkalden and then the emperor, Chapuys proposes she marry Don Luis of Portugal, Francis I that she marry his son Orleans, and English envoys that Henry marry Anne of Cleves and Mary brother William’s son. Anne arranges for Philip of Bavaria to court her, but Henry sends him away, and she tearfully rationalizes that he was Lutheran anyway. In Season Four, the French ambassador Marillac proposes that she marry Orleans.

25 Megan Hickerson, “Putting Women in Their Place: Gender, Sex, and Rape in The Tudors,” in Robison, History, Fiction, and ‘The Tudors,’ 307–28.

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Meyers’ Henry seems most genuine when playing with children, as he does with Mary. But he also uses her for diplomatic advantage or to get the upper hand over Catherine. When he creates his illegitimate son Henry Fitzroy Duke of Richmond and Somerset, possibly intending to legitimize him, Wolsey tells Catherine that Fitzroy supersedes Mary, though that was not the case. When Wolsey tells her Henry has created a separate household for Mary, Catherine is angry, though this was normal. Henry threatens to keep Mary from Catherine if she does not cooperate with the divorce. Chapuys is constantly concerned about Mary, not without reason. When Catherine tells Henry that Mary is ill, he banishes her, and Chapuys tells More he fears for their lives. He reports that Mary is ill, but Henry refuses to let Catherine nurse her. Catherine tells Chapuys the king’s men are using threats to make her take the oath of supremacy. Anne tells Henry she cannot conceive while Catherine and Mary are alive and claims the Seymours are Mary’s supporters. When Henry is injured in a joust, Thomas Boleyn urges Cromwell to put a guard on Mary, and the king tells Brandon that Anne tried to poison her. Mary is at times tender, comforting her crying sister Elizabeth at Hatfield House and prayerfully examining Catherine’s rosary when she dies. An example of Chapuys showing similar tenderness to Mary and using his cunning on her behalf comes when he gently encourages her to sign articles renouncing Rome and acknowledging the royal supremacy and secretly foreswear them before witnesses. This results in her reconciliation with Henry. With Jane they attend church and sit enthroned at Christmas, Mary and Lady Bryan present Elizabeth to the king, and Mary stays with Jane while she is in labor. She tries to save Lady Salisbury from execution, treats Anne of Cleves kindly, encourages Northerners to support her father, prays for Edward, tells Elizabeth they have been restored to the succession, presides over Christmas, weeps when the king goes to war, and dedicates her translation of Erasmus to Catherine Parr. But as the series progresses, Mary becomes colder and less tolerant. When Anne Boleyn offers to reconcile her to the king, she refuses to acknowledge her as queen. After Anne dies, she asks Chapuys if the “harlot” is dead. She declares she would gladly burn Cromwell. She despises Catherine Howard, stalks out of a New Year’s Eve celebration when Anne of Cleves and Catherine dance together, tells Chapuys that Henry should not have divorced Anne of Cleves, refuses his urging to make up with Catherine Howard, and responds to his revelation of her adultery by saying she was not a good Catholic. When the king marries Catherine

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Parr, she brings his children together under one roof, and initially she and Mary are close. But after Anne Askew’s arrest and Gardiner’s investigation of the queen for possession of heretical books, Mary turns against her. Chapuys’s role is often dangerous. He warns More that Henry noticed his absence from Anne’s coronation. Henry complains about imperial allegations that he treats Catherine badly and tells Chapuys that Cromwell intercepts his letters. But Henry congratulates him on the imperial victory at Tunis (1535) and tells Cromwell that Catherine’s death makes peace possible. Chapuys offers to prevent Pope Paul III from publishing the bull of excommunication against Henry if Mary is made his heir but infuriates him by suggesting God wants a female succession. Improbably, he befriends Philippe Chabot, Admiral of France, and in a bizarre plotline hires a constantly hooded William Brereton to kill Anne. Near the end, Chapuys claims to be nostalgic even for his enemies, and he gets a new adversary in the French ambassador Marillac, who again proposes that Mary marry Orleans. Chapuys arranges a secret treaty that leads to the English capture of Boulogne, but soon Henry is angry at him when Charles makes a separate peace with France. Still, upon his departure Chapuys thanks Henry and Catherine Parr for their kindness to Mary and Spain. Not long after, Rich brings Mary word that Chapuys has died, though he actually lived until 1556. At the end of the final episode, a title card declares, “An attempt was made to prevent the king’s eldest daughter, Princess Mary, from becoming queen because of her Catholic beliefs. She was crowned in 1553. Her reign was short and turbulent. She burned many Protestant martyrs and became known as Bloody Mary.” This cavalier dismissal seems out of character, for while the series does not get all the facts straight, it makes clear that Mary and Chapuys’s relationship was important, shows how adversity hardened the princess, correctly characterizes her attitudes to other figures, gives her agency, and makes both characters seem human. This returns us to the question of why Mary is different in The Tudors . In part, it is because Hirst always serves the will of his boss and sometimes his actors. Kapur delighted in playing with light and darkness and apparently dislikes Catholics and Muslims, so Hirst played to the Black Legend

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and gave him a truly dark Mary and Philip. Ben Silverman wanted a sexdrenched soap opera for Showtime, which he delivered. But when former history student Natalie Dormer complained about his depiction of Anne Boleyn as a vapid sex tart, he responded by giving her more intellectual heft. When Jonathan Rhys Meyers objected to getting fat, Hirst let him remain thin. But Hirst knows history and likes to show it. He also has a subversive streak and declared he wanted to undermine the Henrician Reformation’s hallowed place in English history. That helps explain his emphasis on Henry’s carnal motives and respectful treatment of Catherine of Aragon, Mary, and Chapuys, whose faith lends them dignity and seems more sincere than that of the king, Wolsey, Cromwell, and perhaps even More. He seems sympathetic to Robert Aske and other participants in the Pilgrimage of Grace, which Chapuys supports but the bloody suppression of which drives Charles Brandon mad. As to why Mary remains chaste, perhaps it allows Hirst to rehabilitate her, making her descent into furious intolerance more tragic and less her fault.26

The Hilary Mantel Era Hilary Mantel’s mission is to rehabilitate Cromwell, usually a villain, and reduce More to ignominy, which she acknowledges is a reaction against her Catholic upbringing. Though her novels and Peter Kosminsky’s miniseries are innovative in making Cromwell the hero, this mirrors G. R. Elton’s argument in The Tudor Revolution in Government (1953) and subsequent works that Cromwell was the author of revolutionary changes in royal administration in the 1530s. Elton’s student John Guy undercut More’s image as a defender of liberty by detailing his persecution of Protestant “heretics” in The Public Career of Thomas More (1980). Though other historians—starting with Elton’s student David Starkey—have questioned the centrality of Cromwell and the 1530s, Diarmaid MacCulloch—yet another Elton student though not strictly Eltonian—keeps Cromwell at the heart of things in Thomas Cromwell: A Revolutionary Life (2018). MacCulloch and Mantel have praised each other’s work.27 26 Bordo, Creation of Anne Boleyn, Chapter 11. 27 Joan Acocella, “Tudor Tales: Hilary Mantel Reconsiders the Life of Thomas

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Meanwhile, numerous historians have moved away from political and religious history to focus on culture, society, and gender, but Mantel makes it clear she is not interested in doing likewise or in taking a feminist stance.28 Catherine, Mary, and Anne Boleyn are enemies of Cromwell and do not fare well at her hands. In fact, her focus on Cromwell seriously undermines the claim that her account is more authentic than Michael Hirst’s. To be sure, in interviews she is a devastatingly effective critic of The Tudors , pointing out that Hirst repeatedly paints himself into a corner by inventing things that have consequences for the rest of his series.29 But making Cromwell the measure of all things leaves her other characters underdeveloped. Also, More deserves desanctification, but Mantel goes too far and in the miniseries Anton Lesser as More even farther. Jeremy Northam, as More in The Tudors , is more nuanced. Chapuys fits Mantel’s agenda, for he and Cromwell are friendly and his relationship with More is thorny, yet she can use both as foils for the virtuous Cromwell. However, her narrative is so Cromwell-centric that she never has Chapuys interact with Mary, revealing their relationship only through his and others’ conversations with Cromwell. Chapuys and Mary are incompletely developed, and their relationship is ambiguous. As she presents it, Chapuys’s assistance to Catherine and Mary is simultaneously admirable and suspect. He is kind to both, but his focus shifts from Catherine to Mary when he abandons hope for Charles to restore the old queen and Mary becomes the best bet for restoration of Catholicism and a consistently pro-imperial foreign policy. Mary, seldom face-to-face with Cromwell, seems to be more of an object than an agent in her own affairs. She shows up frequently, but often as others are discussing or carrying out actions that affect her.

New Yorker (12 Oct. 2009), accessed 20 Jan. 2021, https://www.newyorker. com/magazine/2009/10/19/tudor-tales; https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-tur ner/the-exchange-hilary-mantel; G.R. Elton, The Tudor Revolution in Government: Administrative Changes in the Reign of Henry VIII (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953); Christopher Coleman and David Starkey, eds., Revolution Reassessed: Revisions in the History of Tudor Administration and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); John A. Guy, The Public Career of Sir Thomas More (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980); Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cromwell: A Revolutionary Life (New York: Viking Press, 2018). 28 “I wanted to actually engage with Thomas Cromwell . . . I wanted to get away from the feminist slant on it.” La Force, “The Exchange: Hilary Mantel.” 29 La Force, “The Exchange: Hilary Mantel.”

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Early in Wolf Hall , Mantel makes clear her contempt for Mary in a caustic comment about her birth: “The living result of the queen’s labors is the diminutive Mary—not really a whole princess, perhaps two-thirds of one.” That foreshadows her subsequent treatment of Mary and Kosminsky’s demeaning depiction of her in the miniseries, further compromising the credibility of both.30 Kosminsky’s miniseries, based on Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies , reduces a thousand pages of Mantel’s dense, pronoun-infested prose to six one-hour episodes. Moving at a snail’s pace on sets often impenetrably dark, it focuses even more on Mark Rylance’s low-key Cromwell. Presumably this explains why it omits so much about Mary and Chapuys from the books. Mathieu Amalric’s Chapuys remains significant but is only in two episodes, while Lily Lesser has a lesser role as Mary and is only in one, and they do not appear together. What remains inexplicable is Kosminsky’s downright cruel treatment of Mary. In a rare moment onscreen, she argues with Cromwell about the pope’s authority, speculates that Henry (Damian Lewis) is off fornicating with Anne (Claire Foy), and complains of a woman’s disorder, stutters, and seems seriously impaired for no discernible reason. Whereas in the novel she holds her own, a casual observer of the miniseries could be forgiven for assuming she is both mentally and physically disabled. This weird characterization is ludicrous. Chapuys first appears in Wolf Hall the novel at a dinner hosted by Italian merchant Antonio Bonvisi, where Cromwell quizzes him about the sack of Rome (1527) and says More believes the emperor is to blame, provoking the Lord Chancellor’s indignation. Only a shortened version of this scene appears in the miniseries’ Episode One, “Three Card Trick,” which deals with the fall of Wolsey (Jonathan Pryce) and otherwise does not feature Chapuys or Mary. In the novel, Chapuys refers to Anne Boleyn as “the concubine,” something Mackay notes he only did later. He dines at Cromwell’s house, asks about Gardiner’s mission to France, calls Anne a witch, and implies Charles will reward him for breaking “the enchantment.” He returns frequently, seeking information about politics and Cromwell himself. Consistent with the traditional view, Mantel comments, “Chapuys is never stuck for something to put in dispatches. If news is scant, he sends the gossip.” She also refers to him as “the Spanish ambassador.” Chapuys disputes with Henry about his marriage, writes to

30 Mantel, Wolf Hall , 88.

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Charles with gossip about Cromwell’s origins and rumors that Anne is pregnant, weeps when she and the king wed, laments that he has failed Catherine, and convinces himself the English will revolt if the emperor invades. Catherine lies to Cromwell about not knowing what Chapuys says in his dispatches. Chapuys complains to Cromwell that Catherine is in ill health and mentions rumors about the king’s infidelity. At one point Cromwell accuses him of hypocrisy, saying “You would dance on my grave.” Little of this appears in the miniseries. Neither Chapuys nor Mary appears in Episode Two, “Entirely Beloved,” in which Cromwell gains the king’s favor. Episode Three, “Anna Regina,” deals with the Act of Supremacy and includes Mary’s aforementioned argument with Cromwell but not Chapuys. Both are missing from Episode Four, “The Devil’s Spit,” which occurs after Anne gives birth to Elizabeth and as Henry seeks recognition from More. Chapuys has more to do in the second novel, Bring Up the Bodies . Henry refuses him permission to visit Mary, and later he plots to help her escape the country, which Cromwell knows but Catherine denies. Still, Cromwell notes, “I don’t care if Chapuys’ letters get through... She [Catherine] isn’t important to the Emperor now, it’s Mary he cares about.” When Cromwell asks the king to let Chapuys visit Mary, Anne is furious, and Henry points out that Chapuys has never acknowledged her as the new queen. Anne is concerned about Mary, particularly because Elizabeth Barton the “Nun of Kent” had a vision of her on the throne, and she tells Henry she cannot have a child while Mary lives. Mary refuses her offer to act as her mother. While staying with Cromwell after his own house burns, Chapuys accuses his host of putting monks and nuns on the road by dissolving monasteries. He and his French counterpart compete for Henry’s favor, but he finally gets permission to visit Catherine shortly before she dies, mourns her death, complains about Henry Fitzroy’s presence at court, and expresses doubts about Elizabeth’s legitimacy. He and Cromwell discuss a treaty to protect Mary, but when Cromwell tricks him into bowing to Anne and Henry learns about the treaty discussion, the king is angry at both men. Miniseries Episode 5, “Crows,” in which Henry becomes interested in Jane Seymour (Kate Phillips), is based on Bring Up the Bodies . Appropriately, therefore, it features more of Chapuys, who chides Cromwell for evicting monks and nuns, threatens to cut off trade with England, asks to see Catherine (Joanne Whalley) before she dies but is denied,

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tells Cromwell about her funeral, pumps him for information about Jane, warns him that Anne will bring him down, advises him to strike first, and is tricked into bowing to her. Henry gets angry with Cromwell and Chapuys and tells his council that Mary will not marry outside of England. The miniseries plays this out with considerable drama. However, neither Chapuys nor Mary is in Episode Six, “Master of Phantoms,” wherein Cromwell seeks to get rid of Anne. The Mirror and the Light begins after Anne’s execution and concludes with Cromwell’s. Chapuys is busy throughout the book, mixing business with pleasure at dinners with Cromwell, helping restore Mary to Henry’s good graces, and navigating intrigue at court and internationally for Charles’ benefit, though he is out of the country when Cromwell goes to the block. It is not given detailed consideration here because it has no role relative to the miniseries. Generally, critics were less sanguine about it, and a promised Season Two of Wolf Hall has yet to materialize.

Conclusion Though The Six Wives of Henry VIII broke new ground by including both Mary and Chapuys in its story, giving them more attention, and treating them respectfully, their still largely negative image in Tudor historiography in 1970 and the miniseries’ focus on the king’s marriages likely explain why they did not have even bigger roles. By the time Michael Hirst began work on The Tudors , the historiography had changed dramatically, and once Showtime renewed the series for a second season in 2008, he had abundant room for them, and they were essential even to the highly modified story he told. Though Mantel dislikes The Tudors , often for good reasons, both she and Kosminsky would have done well to take their cue from Hirst where Mary is concerned. After all, she makes Chapuys important to Cromwell, and in reality, Mary was important to both of them—Chapuys because he cared about her and she was integral to his plans, Cromwell because she was a threat. But Mary, an almost perpetual third-person reference in the novels and an apparent invalid in the miniseries, is one of the least developed of Mantel and Kosminsky’s characters. That is a significant departure from history in what is supposed to be a more realistic account. Six Wives, The Tudors , and Wolf Hall all were popular upon release, won awards, and made actors into stars. All are still available, but The Tudors and Wolf Hall have superseded Six Wives, perhaps not in quality

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but in familiarity and influence. Young viewers are likely to see the older miniseries as old-fashioned and prefer Hirst’s sexier soap opera. But for the absence of dragons, The Tudors may have more in common with Game of Thrones than with Six Wives, where Henry actually ages. Though the writing and acting is not as good, Wolf Hall the miniseries is more like Six Wives in that it might have done more with Mary and Chapuys. Oddly, in that respect it seems like a step backward from The Tudors. Generally, however, critics and historians do not like The Tudors . David Starkey may be uniquely livid about it, but many historians cannot see why Hirst turned the real-life Tudor soap opera into a fictional one. The present author has criticized it for numerous reasons. On the other hand, literary scholars Jerome de Groote and Ramona Wray regard it more favorably. Also, the first volume of scholarly essays about the show, which the present author edited, was not a sweeping denunciation. Contributors found The Tudors egregious in many ways but also pointed out things it did well. Like Maria Doyle Kennedy (Catherine of Aragon), Natalie Dormer (Anne Boleyn), Sam O’Neill (Wolsey), and Jeremy Northam (More), Sarah Bolger and Anthony Brophy are good enough actors to make their characters interesting even if their circumstances are not always convincing, and the series gives them major roles and recognizes the importance of Mary and Chapuys’s relationship.31 Generally, critics love Mantel’s trilogy and Kosminsky’s miniseries, some historians praise them, and others are ambivalent, but they do not evoke the same outrage. Perhaps they seem more respectable. Viewers will not mistake the miniseries for soft-core pornography. Still, both the novels and miniseries have weaknesses. Mantel’s affected prose is annoying, especially her use of the pronoun “he” for Cromwell in sentences where it appears to have another antecedent, and it hardly seems necessary—as she claims—to keep readers aware that the story is told through his eyes. Onscreen, Mark Rylance’s torpid perambulation and monotone delivery

31 Robison, History, Fiction, and ‘The Tudors,’ 4 for Starkey and writ large for the tenor of the whole volume.; Ramona Wray, “Henry’s Desperate Housewives: The Tudors, the Politics of Historiography, and the Beautiful Body of Jonathan Rhys Meyers,” in Greg Colón Semenza, ed., The English Renaissance in Popular Culture: An Age for all Time (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 25–42; Jerome de Groote, “Slashing History: The Tudors,” in Tatiana C. String and Marcus Bull, eds., Tudorism: Historical Imagination and the Appropriation of the Sixteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, 243–6; Robison, History, Fiction, and ‘The Tudors.’

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are uninspired, and occasionally the whole cast seems to be involved in adult cosplay. However, its greatest problem lies elsewhere. Hirst, Mantel, and Kosminsky all know history and claim to present it accurately, but none of them do so, making it implausible to argue that any have been more faithful than the others to history in the most literal sense. Once writers depart from documented evidence, the product is not history but “historical” fiction, and what all three offer is less Tudor history than Tudorism, i.e., “the post-Tudor mobilization of any and all representations, images, associations, artefacts, spaces, and cultural scripts that either have or are supposed to have their roots in the Tudor era.”32 Their work may be less blatant than Henry VIII chocolate, Six Wives coffee cups, and Tudor ties, but it still propagates an illusion. As Haigh notes, some commentators argue that while historical films might not get the facts straight, they can get the “big picture” or “essence” of history right, but that is not history.33 If we accept, however, that some films may do more than others to recognize the importance of certain historical figures, treat them respectfully, identify the challenges they faced, and perhaps at least hint at their real personalities, that leads to the shocking realization that The Tudors does better with Mary and Chapuys than Wolf Hall and may be the most judicious fictional account. That is not comforting, but it might provide some teachable moments concerning the intersection of Tudor history and Tudorism and caution viewers against confusing respectability with historicity. One other matter worth considering is that The Tudors and Wolf Hall suggest that we may not be as far removed from sectarian influences as we sometimes think. Hirst, who offers a favorable view of Mary, admits that he sought to present the English Reformation from a Catholic point of view. Mantel, who offers an unfavorable view of Mary, admits that her fondness for Cromwell is a reaction against her Catholic upbringing. Regrettably, other recent forays into Tudor filmmaking, i.e., the beautiful but silly 2018 film Mary, Queen of Scots (a Hirst vehicle in its early stages) and the absurd television shows Reign (2013–17), The Spanish Princess (2019–20), and Becoming Elizabeth (forthcoming)—all of which make The Tudors seem respectable—offer little hope to anyone seeking judicious treatment of the Tudor period. Producers likely will continue

32 String and Bull, Tudorism, 1. 33 Haigh, “Kapur’s Elizabeth,” 130–34.

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to turn perfectly interesting history into fiction, and Tudor historians’ families, reluctant to endure another learned rant, will continue to ban them from the living room when watching the movies in question.

Bibliography Acocella, Joan. “Tudor Tales: Hilary Mantel Reconsiders the Life of Thomas Cromwell.” The New Yorker, 12 Oct. 2009. https://www.newyorker.com/ magazine/2009/10/19/tudor-tales. Anderson, Maxwell. Anne of the Thousand Days. New York: William Sloane Associates, 1948. Betteridge, Thomas. “A Queen for All Seasons: Elizabeth I on Film.” In Doran, Susan, and Thomas S. Freeman, eds. The Myth of Elizabeth. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, 242–59. Bolt, Robert. A Man for All Seasons. New York: Vintage, 1962. Colbert, Carolyn. “Well, then . . . Hail Mary”: Mary in The Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyatt (1607) and Lady Jane (1986).” In Bordo, Susan, ed. The Creation of Anne Boleyn: A New Look at England’s Most Notorious Queen. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016, 215–32. Coleman, Christopher and David Starkey, eds., Revolution Reassessed: Revisions in the History of Tudor Administration and Government. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Coster, Will. “The Armada, War and Propaganda in the Cinema” In. Doran, Susan, and Thomas S. Freeman, eds. Tudors and Stuart on Film: Historical Perspectives. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, 150–63. Doran, Susan, and Thomas S. Freeman, eds. Mary Tudor: Old and New Perspectives. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Doran, Susan, and Thomas S. Freeman, eds. The Myth of Elizabeth. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Doran, Susan, and Thomas S. Freeman, eds. Tudors and Stuart on Film: Historical Perspectives. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Duffy, Eamon. Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400– 1580. 2nd ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. Duffy, Eamon and David Loades, eds., The Church of Mary Tudor. Abingdon: Routledge, 2006. Duncan, Sarah and Valerie Schutte, eds., The Birth of a Queen: Essays on the Quincentenary of Mary I . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Edwards, John Edwards. Mary I: England’s Catholic Queen. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011.

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Elton, G. R. The Tudor Revolution in Government: Administrative Changes in the Reign of Henry VIII . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953. Fleet, John. Churchill and the Movie Mogul [Documentary]. London: January Pictures, 2019. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9461284/. Freeman, Thomas S. “A Tyrant for All Seasons: Henry VIII on Film.” In Doran, Susan, and Thomas S. Freeman, eds. Tudors and Stuart on Film: Historical Perspectives. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, 30–45. Groote, Jerome de. “Slashing History: The Tudors.” In String, Tatiana C., and Marcus Bull. Tudorism: Historical Imagination and the Appropriation of the Sixteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, 243–6. Guy, John. A Daughter’s Love: Thomas More and His Dearest Meg. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009. Guy, John. The Public Career of Sir Thomas More. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980. Haigh, Christopher. English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Haigh, Christopher. “Kapur’s Elizabeth.” In Doran, Susan, and Thomas S. Freeman, eds. Tudors and Stuart on Film: Historical Perspectives. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, 122–35. Hickerson, Megan. “Putting Women in Their Place: Gender, Sex, and Rape in The Tudors.” In Robison, William B., ed. History, Fiction, and ‘The Tudors’: Sex, Politics, Power, and Artistic License in the Showtime Series. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, 307–28. Hugo Victor., Marie Tudor. 1833. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/39133/ 39133-h/39133-h.htm. Jones, Whitney R. D. The Mid-Tudor Crisis 1539–63. London: Macmillan, 1973. Knox, John. The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. Geneva, 1558. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/9660/9660-h/ 9660-h.htm. La Force, Thessaly. “The Exchange: Hilary Mantel.” The New Yorker, 12 Oct. 2009. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-exchangehilary-mantel. Levin, Carole. The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth and the Politics of Sex and Power. 2nd ed. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Levin, Carole and Estelle Paranque. “The Significance of the King’s Children in The Tudors.” In Robison, William B., ed. History, Fiction, and ‘The Tudors’: Sex, Politics, Power, and Artistic License in the Showtime Series. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, 115–26. Lipscomb, Suzannah. “Henry VIII: A King Caught on Camera.” History Today, 22 Mar. 2016. https://www.historytoday.com/making-history/henryviii-king-caught-camera.

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Loach, Jennifer, and Robert Tittler, eds. The Mid-Tudor Polity c.1540–1560. London: Macmillan, 1980. Loades, David. Mary Tudor: A Life. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. Lundell, Richard. “Renaissance Diplomacy and the Limits of Empire: Eustace Chapuys, Habsburg Imperialisms, and Dissimulation as Method.” In Andrade, Tonio, and William Reger, eds. The Limits of Empire: European Imperial Formations in Early Modern World History: Essays in Honor of Geoffrey Parker. London: Routledge, 2012, 205–22. MacCulloch, Diarmaid. Thomas Cromwell: A Revolutionary Life. New York: Viking Press, 2018. Mackay, Lauren. Inside the Tudor Court: Henry VIII and His Six Wives through the Writings of the Spanish Ambassador Eustace Chapuys. Stroud: Amberley Publishing, 2014. Mackay, Lauren. Wolf Hall Companion: The People, the Places, the History. London: Batsford, 2020. Maltby, William S. Maltby. The Black Legend in England: The Development of Anti-Spanish Sentiment 1558–1660. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1971. Mantel, Hilary. Wolf Hall. London: Fourth Estate, 2009. Mantel, Hilary. Bring Up the Bodies. London: Fourth Estate, 2012. Mantel, Hilary. The Mirror and the Light. London: Fourth Estate, 2020. Marshall, Peter. “Saints and Cinemas: A Man for All Seasons.” In Doran, Susan, and Thomas S. Freeman, eds. Tudors and Stuart on Film: Historical Perspectives. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, 46–59. Parrill, Sue, and William B. Robison. The Tudors on Film and Television. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013. Pettegree, Andrew. Marian Protestantism: Six Studies. Berkeley: Scolar Press, 1996. Pollard, A.F. The History of England from the Accession of Edward VI to the Death of Elizabeth, 1547–1603. London: Longman, Green, 1915. Porter, Linda. Mary Tudor: The First Queen. London: Portrait, 2007. Prescott, H.M.F. Mary Tudor. London: Constable, 1940. Richards, Judith M. Mary Tudor. London: Routledge, 2008. Richardson, Glenn. “Anne of the Thousand Days.” In Doran, Susan, and Thomas S. Freeman, eds. Tudors and Stuart on Film: Historical Perspectives. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, 60–75. Robison, William B. “Bad Girl, Bad Mother, Bad Queen: Catherine de’ Medici in Fiction, Film, and History.” In Chappell, Julie A., and Mallory Young, eds. Bad Girls and Transgressive Women in Popular Television, Fiction, and Film. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, 159–82.

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Robison, William B., ed. History, Fiction, and ‘The Tudors’: Sex, Politics, Power, and Artistic License in the Showtime Series. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Robison, William B. “Lancastrians, Tudors, and World War II: British and German Historical Films as Propaganda, 1933–1945.” Arts 9/3, 10 Aug. 2020. https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0752/9/3/88. Robison, William B. “Marrying Mary to the Black Legend: Anti-Catholicism and Anti-Marian Messages in Anglo-American Films About Philip II.” In Duncan, Sarah, and Valerie Schutte, eds. The Birth of a Queen: Essays on the Quincentenary of Mary I. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, 233–54. Robison, William B. “Stripped of Their Altars: Film, Faith, and Tudor Royal Women from the Silent Era to the Twenty-First Century, 1895–2014.” In Chappell, Julie A., and Kaley A. Kramer, eds. Women during the English Reformations: Renegotiating Gender and Religious Identity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, 146–55. Shakespeare, William. Henry VIII . Folger Shakespeare Library. ed. Barbara A. Mowat. New York: Washington Square Press, 2007. String, Tatiana C. and Marcus Bull. Tudorism: Historical Imagination and the Appropriation of the Sixteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Walker, Greg. The Private Life of Henry VIII: A British Film Guide. London: I. B. Tauris, 2003. Warnicke, Retha. “Mary I, Queen of England: Historiographical Essay, 2006 to the Present.” In Duncan, Sarah and Valerie Schutte, eds., The Birth of a Queen: Essays on the Quincentenary of Mary I. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, 255–72. Westbrook, Vivienne. “Elizabeth: The Golden Age: A Sign of the Times?” In Doran, Susan, and Thomas S. Freeman, eds. Tudors and Stuart on Film: Historical Perspectives. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, 164–77. Whitelock, Anna., Mary Tudor: England’s First Queen. London: Bloomsbury, 2009. Wray, Ramona. “Henry’s Desperate Housewives: The Tudors, the Politics of Historiography, and the Beautiful Body of Jonathan Rhys Meyers.” In Semenza, Greg Colón, ed. The English Renaissance n Popular Culture: An Age for all Time. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, 25–42.

European Entanglements

Venetian Diplomacy Under Mary I Samantha Perez

In August 1554, Giacomo Soranzo, the recently recalled Venetian ambassador to England, issued the following report to the Senate describing the character of Mary I: She is of low stature…and very thin; her eyes are white and large, and her hair reddish…and were her age not on the decline, she might be called handsome…. Her Majesty’s countenance indicates great benignity and clemency, which are not belied by her conduct, for although she has had many enemies, and though so many of them were by law condemned to death, yet had the executions depended solely on her Majesty’s will, not one of them perhaps would have been enforced; but deferring to her Council in everything, she in this matter likewise complied with the wishes of others rather than her own.1

1 Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts Relating to English Affairs, Existing in the Archives and Collections of Venice, and in Other Libraries of Northern Italy (hereafter CSP Venetian), ed. Rawdon Brown, 5:532–533. August 18, 1554.

S. Perez (B) Southeastern Louisiana University, Hammond, LA, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 V. Schutte and J. S. Hower (eds.), Writing Mary I, Queenship and Power, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95132-0_4

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The mention of her mercy in Soranzo’s relazione, carefully inserted between details of her sparse diet and the fashion of her embroidered dresses, cloaks the ambassador’s attention to information vital to international politics: Mary’s advancing age, deference to her advisors, and the many enemies, including the Duke of Northumberland, who had plotted against her since she prepared to assume the throne the previous year. Venice certainly had cause for such interest in English proceedings. As E. Harrison Harbison surmised, “Upon the accession of Mary in 1553, London became the focal point of European diplomacy,”2 and her reconciliation with Rome and Spanish marriage secured England’s importance in European politics. Through their ambassadors in London, the Venetian state closely observed the international affairs unfolding in the English court and their effect on the Italian peninsula. Relying on diplomatic correspondence between Venice and the Republic’s representatives serving in England, this chapter examines Venetian ambassadors’ portrayal of Mary I and identifies their deeply rooted awareness of the queen’s influence on the Continental balance of power, Catholic restoration, and Italian politics. Such analysis reveals the Venetian effort to command statecraft for the advantage of Italian welfare and offers perspectives on Mary—her marriage, faith, character, and authority—from foreign eyes. Despite recent studies in the development of early modern diplomacy by Isabella Lazzarini, Catherine Fletcher, and Daniela Frigo,3 Venetian ambassadors’ role in shaping the dialogue between Tudor England and Italy remains largely overshadowed by greater attention to French and Habsburg powers or papal politics. The Venetian Senate had been deploying envoys across Europe as part of an ad hoc diplomatic system since at least the thirteenth century,4 but international 2 E. Harrison Harbison, “French Intrigue at the Court of Queen Mary,” The American Historical Review 45 (1940): 533. 3 Isabella Lazzarini, Communication and Conflict: Italian Diplomacy in the Early Renaissance, 1350–1520 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Catherine Fletcher, Diplomacy in Renaissance Rome: The Rise of the Resident Ambassador (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Daniela Frigo, ed., Politics and Diplomacy in Early Modern Italy: The Structure of Diplomatic Practice, 1450–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). These works and other recent studies greatly build upon the work of Garrett Mattingly. See Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (1955). Reprint London: J. Cape, 1962. 4 Donald E. Queller, “Early Venetian Legislation Concerning Foreign Ambassadors,” Studies in the Renaissance 12 (1965): 12.

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engagement expanded quickly following the Wars in Lombardy in the mid-1400s. Soon, Venice maintained permanent embassies in Rome, Paris, Constantinople, and London, and its diplomats became resident ambassadors tasked with representing the Serenissima’s interests abroad. The records of these diplomats are important because they disclose both the actions taken by Venice’s agents to direct events in foreign courts as well as their reflections on European people and their problems. Since Emma Gurney Salter offered the first examination of diplomatic relations between England and Venice in 1930,5 historians have begun to more closely investigate these exchanges. In 1940, Harbison recognized the competition between foreign ambassadors during Mary’s reign and located the Venetians present in her court whenever they emerged in the bitter politics between the French and Imperial envoys.6 Thirty years later, Donald E. Queller explored Venetian legislation regulating the conduct of their own ambassadors and foreign diplomats in residence in Venice,7 and in 2007, Ekaterina G. Domnina used ambassadorial reports from 1485 to 1637 to recreate Venetian knowledge of England, its climate, geography, and population.8 Michael Wyatt has provided a detailed study of the cultural and political contact between Tudor England and Italy, primarily under Henry VIII and Elizabeth.9 Venetian activity in Marian England thus occupies a liminal historiographic space: when scholars have examined diplomacy under Mary, they have largely focused on non-Venetians, and when historians have examined the evolution of Venetian diplomacy, they often neglect the ambassadors stationed at Mary’s court. The present study contributes to the ongoing analysis of English-Italian engagement by identifying the significance of Mary’s policies in the dispatches between

5 Emma Gurney Salter, Tudor England through Venetian Eyes (London: Williams & Norgate, 1930). 6 E. Harrison Harbison, Rival Ambassadors at the Court of Queen Mary (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1940). 7 Queller, “The Development of Ambassadorial Relazioni,” in Renaissance Venice, ed. J. R. Hale (London: Faber & Faber, 1973), 174–196. 8 Ekaterina G. Domnina, “‘The Riches of England Are Greater Than Those of Any Other Country in Europe’: A Venetian Image of Early Modern England,” in Mighty Europe, 1400–1700: Writing an Early Modern Continent, ed. Andrew W. Hiscock (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007), 117–131. 9 Michael Wyatt, The Italian Encounter with Tudor England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

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the Venetian Senate and its representatives. By expanding beyond scholarship’s focus on dominant European powers, this examination of Venetian activity in Mary’s court reveals their understanding of England’s role in advancing the Serenissima’s security and the extent of Marian influence across Europe. To locate sixteenth-century accounts of Mary’s reign, this chapter relies primarily on Venetian descriptions of England recorded in the relazioni presented to the Senate and dispatches between Italian agents published in the Calendar of State Papers.10 The loss of manuscripts in the Archivio di Stato di Venezia presents challenges to investigating international diplomacy in this period. Fires in 1483, 1574, and 1577 resulted in significant damage to the archives and the destruction of manuscripts related to the maintenance of Venetian embassies abroad, including the calendar of dispatches from Spain and likely similar correspondence from Venetian envoys stationed in England. Additionally, as part of Napoleon’s conquest of Venice in 1797, the Republic surrendered to the French 500 manuscripts from the archives, including collections of dispatches from Venetian ambassadors from the mid-sixteenth century to the late eighteenth century, which were not returned until after 1815.11 Whether by fire or misplacement during transfer and relocation, the loss of relevant records demands that historians carefully consult extant sources from a range of governing bodies, both in England and in Venice, as well as personal correspondence to construct a clear narrative of diplomatic proceedings and an understanding of each party’s agenda. For the majority of dispatches consulted in this chapter, the Calendar of State Papers provides verbatim translations of the original Italian texts, but it is important to recognize that the selection of documents compiled in the CSP as well as the summaries included represent a nineteenthcentury English perspective, despite editors’ efforts to remain “decentered, particularistic, and context sensitive,” as Christine L. Krueger has

10 The reliance on these particular collections is also partly due to the challenges of conducting research during the COVID-19 pandemic. Travel restrictions and the closure of archives encouraged asking new questions from available sources, an endeavor that certainly inspired this work. 11 David Gilks, “Attitudes to the Displacement of Cultural Property in the Wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon,” The Historical Journal 56, no. 1 (2013): 137–143.

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suggested.12 As such, the CSP functions as a genre of history writing that examines international diplomacy largely through the lens of English affairs. This paper aims to contribute to recent scholarship on Italian diplomacy and Marian politics by identifying Venetian priorities in these sources and serves as a launching point for future inquiries that more fully contextualize Venetian-English dynamics by including analysis of internal Venetian policies and deliberations. Rather than deemphasizing Mary’s presence in foreign affairs, greater attention to non-English sources more convincingly reveals how Venetian leaders understood the trans-European significance of Mary’s reign through the state of Catholicism, Imperial power in Europe, foreign trade, and how proceedings within the Marian court shaped the practices of Venetian ambassadors in these critical years of development for early modern diplomacy. Under Doge Agostino Barbarigo, Venice and England established formal diplomatic ties, with staffed Venetian embassies in London, in 1497 and continued with only an occasional lapse until ambassadors left England to follow Philip II in 1557. Andrea Trevisan, a member of the Great Council, served as the first official ambassador under Henry VII until his return to Italy in May 1498. Ensuring Italian stability and trade was the primary goal for diplomacy with England from the embassy’s inception. In 1496, the year before Trevisan arrived, the Venetian Senate feared a brewing war with France and tasked two merchants traveling to London to “[tempt] the king of England to make war on the king of France in order to distract him from the Italian enterprise.”13 Trevisan’s objective became further developing relations with Henry VII, who was by then a nominal member of Alexander VI’s Holy League to oppose French ambitions in the Italian peninsula. The Republic financed a permanent embassy in London, and it housed the resident ambassador, his secretary, and other officials necessary to navigate any linguistic or cultural barriers.14 Such Venetian diplomatic effort continued through Henry VII’s reign, the succession of Henry VIII, the tumultuous years of the King’s Great Matter, and the organization of the Protestant church under Edward VI.

12 Christine K. Krueger, “Why She Lived at the PRO: Mary Anne Everett Green and the Profession of History,” Journal of British Studies 42, no. 1 (2003): 84. 13 Lazzarini, Communication and Conflict, 22. 14 Queller, “The Development of Ambassadorial Relazioni,” 178.

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The Venetian government charged its ambassadors with strict rules, monitored their behavior while abroad, and demanded total deference to official foreign policy, thus linking envoys’ action with a state-sanctioned agenda. Although chosen from the aristocracy, these ambassadors were expected to serve the Republic, not abuse their position for personal or family gain.15 The state dictated how diplomats should present themselves in foreign courts and ordered them to remain neutral in political affairs unless acting with permission of the Signoria.16 Legislation in 1451 prohibited Venetian officials from giving audience to foreign envoys in their private homes,17 and ambassadors were forbidden from accepting bribes or gifts, which diplomats were required to relinquish to the state upon their return. The Venetian government was quick to act when its ambassadors failed to meet their standards. When a report accused Francesco Capello, the ambassador in London from 1501 to 1502, of using “unsuitable language” to describe the pope and acting against the wishes of the state, the Senate swiftly reprimanded him, lamenting “they cannot sufficiently express their displeasure,” and ordered Capello to repair immediately any damage done with Henry VII.18 Five days later, the Senate hastily issued an apology when they realized they had been misinformed.19 Because the Republic so closely monitored and regulated their representatives abroad and were typically quick to respond to any wrongdoings, it is safe to assume a concerted relationship between the ambassador’s actions and the Serenissima’s will. From the relazioni provided by these ambassadors upon their return to Italy, the Venetian state had a fairly thorough comprehension of England’s history and society. Each of these reports, delivered to the Senate and doge, communicated all relevant information for the Senate to understand England as a governing power and make appropriate decisions regarding foreign policy. The Venetians developed the relazioni into a formulaic genre that was so well respected by other politicians in the sixteenth century that copies sold across Europe, raising worries in the

15 Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy, 94. 16 Emma Gurney Salter, Tudor England through Venetian Eyes, 41. 17 Queller, “Early Venetian Legislation Concerning Foreign Ambassadors,” 13. 18 CSP Venetian, 1:292. February 18, 1502. 19 CSP Venetian, 1:292. February 23, 1502.

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Senate about the security of state secrets.20 The reports included detailed descriptions of terrain, economy, religious practices, and characteristics of the country’s inhabitants. Although occasionally confused about the peculiarities of English systems,21 the Venetians consistently expressed a favorable impression of England and especially London, described in 1557 as: …the metropolis of the kingdom, and truly royal, being with reason regarded as one of the principal cities of Europe…. It has handsome streets and buildings, especially the bridge…all of solid stone, over the river, and the Cathedral church of St. Paul. But yet more beautiful is the site of the city, placed as it is advantageously on the banks of the Thames, from which, besides beauty, it derives its wealth, from vast concourse of ships, of three and four hundred Venetian tons burthen, which enter the river from every quarter.22

These relazioni often emphasized the similarities between Venice and England in comparison to other regions. The English disposition was mild and even-tempered, much like the Italian, not cold and distant like the German, spirited like the French, or shrewd like the Spanish.23 Both London and Venice were mercantile centers that depended on their waterways for prosperity: the Thames for England, the canals and Adriatic for Venice. Perhaps the Venetians also recognized another commonality: both England and Venice were caught between the competing interests of France and the Holy Roman Empire during the Habsburg-Valois Wars. By emphasizing such similarities in reports to the Senate, ambassadors conveyed England’s potential as a prospective ally in developing tensions between competing empires on the continent. Venice dispatched four ambassadors to their embassy in London during the reign of Mary I. The first, Giacomo Soranzo (1518–1599), arrived in 1551 and represented the Republic under Edward VI and during the

20 Queller, “The Development of Ambassadorial Relazioni,” 176–177. 21 One example is Giacomo Soranzo’s confusion between English provinces and inde-

pendent states; he wrongfully lists Cornwall as a separate division of the island, along with England and Scotland. Domnina, “A Venetian Image of Early Modern England,” 122–123. 22 CSP Venetian, 6:1045. May 13, 1557. 23 Domnina, “A Venetian Image of Early Modern England,” 125.

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transition to Mary. Although Soranzo was knighted and presented gifts from the king, his tenure was marked by the sweating sickness and inflation, and he requested his withdrawal even before Edward’s death.24 After Soranzo’s recall in 1554, Federico Badoer (1519–1593), accompanied by Giovanni Michiel (1516–1596) as extraordinary ambassador, served until 1557 when they were replaced by Michele Surian (1519–1574), who followed Philip II during his stay in England from March to July that year. All four were selected from noble families with connections to the highest offices of the Republic and diplomatic lineage. Soranzo had already served as ambassador to the Duke of Urbino before his election by the Council of Ten for the position in England. Michele Surian was the son of Antonio Surian, who had served as ambassador to England from 1519 to 1523, and himself had been envoy to Ferdinand, brother of Charles V. Federico Badoer’s family had extensive diplomatic experience. His father Alvise had been extraordinary ambassador to Charles V in 1537 and then ambassador to Constantinople in 1539.25 Another member of the family, Andrea Badoer, had served as the envoy to England from 1509 to 1515 during the critical years involving the League of Cambrai.26 The Council of Ten’s selection of qualified representatives suggests that they understood the importance of the London embassy as a hub of international diplomacy and illustrates their commitment to defending Venetian interests in the English court. The perspectives of these ambassadors reflected not only contemporary Venetian evaluation of England itself but also the characterization of Mary I based on perceived English gender norms. Ambassadors were often knowledgeable about their predecessors’ descriptions of foreign kingdoms, some even dutifully studying past relazioni before departing to be as well prepared as possible for their own assignment.27 After his return in 1498, Trevisan provided the Senate with a thorough account of England

24 CSP Venetian, 5:377. June 12, 1553. 25 T. C. Price Zimmerman, Paolo Giovio: The Historian and the Crisis of Sixteenth-

century Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 170–172. 26 David Jayne Hill, A History of Diplomacy in the International Development of Europe, volume 2 (London: Longman & Co., 1914), 282. 27 Queller, “The Development of Ambassadorial Relazioni,” 176.

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and portrayed English women as “handsome and well-proportioned”28 but “very violent in their passions.”29 The English, Trevisan warned, were prone to excessive displays of luxury,30 and Sebastian Giustinian complained that he did not receive sufficient funds to accommodate the English lifestyle with so many great feasts.31 English women, in particular, dressed in elaborate fashion,32 and several envoys noted the extent of their freedom in society. Niccolo di Favri, who worked at the Venetian embassy under Andrea Badoer, wrote in a letter to Badoer’s son-in-law that English women “go to some tavern to regale, their relatives not taking this amiss, as such is the custom.”33 Soranzo repeated a very similar observation in 1554 when he wrote, “Women are no less sociable than men, and it is customary and allowed for women, without any regard, to go to taverns, either alone or accompanied by their husbands, and have lunch and dinner where they please.”34 The shared elements between these statements—both focusing on women socializing in taverns, stressing such practices as the accepted norm—indicate Soranzo’s familiarity with earlier reports on England and an assumed agreement on English women’s behavior. Aware of her extraordinary status as queen, the Venetian ambassadors framed Mary as both demonstrating and surpassing these stereotypes of English women. Soranzo’s depiction of Mary’s devotion to Catholicism echoes Trevisan’s assessment of women’s violent passions: In matters of the Catholic religion, she is so firm that although the king her brother and his Council forbade her from having Mass celebrated according to the custom of the Roman church, she nevertheless had it

28 Trevisan, A Relation, or Rather a True Account of the Island of England: with Sundry Particulars of the Customs of these People, and of the Royal Revenues under King Henry the Seventh, about the Year 1500, ed. Charlotte A. Sneyd (London, 1847), 20. 29 Trevisan, A Relation, 24. 30 Trevisan, A Relation, 46–47. 31 CSP Venetian, 2:221. January 3, 1515. Domnina, “A Venetian Image of Early

Modern England,” 129. 32 CSP Venetian, 1:89–90. February 1513. 33 CSP Venetian, 2:90. February 1513. 34 Relazione d’Inghilterra di Giocomo Soranzo in Le Relazioni degli Ambasciatori

Veneti al Senato, ed. Eugenio Albèri (Florence: Società Editrice Fiorentina, 1853), Series 1, vol. 3, 52–53.

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performed in secret, nor did she ever want to consent to another form of religion; and this was with so much fervor…that, if the opportunity arose, she would commit herself to martyrdom, putting her hopes in God alone.35

Likewise, Mary exhibits her own luxurious display in the ambassadors’ records, not for frequent elaborate feasts but for jewelry: “She also makes great use of jewels, wearing them both on her chaperon and round her neck, and as trimming for her gowns…and although she has a great plenty of them left by her predecessors, yet were she better supplied with money than she is, she would doubtless buy many more.”36 Yet, as royalty, Mary had access to unique opportunity that allowed greater refinement necessary for her position of authority. Lodovico Falier, ambassador from 1528 to 1531, described sixteen-year-old Mary as a “beautiful, graceful, and most virtuous princess, in no way inferior to her mother.”37 Soranzo credited her with being fluent in Latin, French, and Spanish, able to understand but not speak Italian, and skilled in playing the lute.38 However, the Venetian accounts also claimed Mary’s conscious rejection of English identity. Soranzo accused her of “[demonstrating] that she had little love for the English nation.”39 This sentiment, much like her preference for a Spanish marriage, arose from her affinity to her mother’s lineage more than her father’s: “The queen, having been born of a Spanish mother, is always inclined towards that nation, so much so that she is little content with being English and is more proud of being born with Spanish blood.”40 Early ambassadors’ descriptions of English women thus worked to contextualize Mary’s character for those stationed in her court, but her reported rejection of English identity signaled to the Senate that they could not rely only on past diplomatic experience to predict the direction of her reign.

35 Relazione di Giocomo Soranzo, 33. 36 CSP Venetian, 5:533. August 18, 1554. 37 Relazione d’Inghilterra di Lodovico Falier in Le Relazioni degli Ambasciatori Veneti al Senato, ed. Eugenio Albèri (Florence: Società Editrice Fiorentina, 1853), Series 1, vol. 3, 10. 38 Relazione di Giocomo Soranzo, 33. 39 Relazione di Giocomo Soranzo, 38. 40 Relazione di Giocomo Soranzo, 78–79.

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In the mid-sixteenth century, Venice had considerable reason to monitor Mary’s involvement in international politics. The series of Italian Wars that followed Charles VIII’s first French invasion had attracted the attention of major European powers who fought with little pause from 1494 to 1559 to control Italy. Venice, as historian William Bouwsma suggests, initially misjudged the new foreign presence in the peninsula when the city took advantage of other Italian territories’ distraction to amass a great land empire in northern Italy, including Brescia, Padua, Verona, and Vicenza.41 To oppose Venice, France, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Papal States formed the League of Cambrai in December 1508. Though the League stripped the Republic of its newly acquired lands by 1509, conflict continued anyway, with France and the Empire becoming warring rivals once again. The Italian Wars were especially devastating to the Venetian Republic. In the opening years of the war, Venice assembled an army of 15,000 soldiers, plus militia, to aid in repelling the French, and they funded the maintenance of a sizable force throughout the war.42 Their terrible defeat at the Battle of Angadello, which cost Venice approximately 10,000 soldiers, invited the loss of its terraferma. In 1509, enemy troops threatened Venice so greatly that Machiavelli commented, “If their city had not been surrounded by the waters, we should have beheld her end.”43 That same year, chronicler Antonio Grumello from Pavia, which was then under Venetian control, described the violence against peasants during the war: when Charles V reached Padua in summer, his forces attacked the city, “destroying and ruining the whole land…and those peasants, not knowing what war was since they had never seen one before, shut themselves in their rooms…and then burned inside their homes.”44 Here, along with the sacks of Peschiera in 1509 and Monselice in 1510, the ongoing war resulted not just in loss of Venetian territory but in the massacre of hundreds of

41 William J. Bouwsma, Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty: Renaissance Values in the Age of the Counter Reformation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 97. 42 Michael Mallett and Christine Shaw, The Italian Wars, 1494–1559 (London: Pearson, 2012), 30. 43 Machiavelli, Discourses in Machiavelli: The Chief Works and Others, trans. Allan Gilbert (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989), 3:411. 44 Antonio Grumello, Cronaca (Milan: Francesco Colombo, 1856), 119.

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civilians.45 Additionally, Venice’s mercantile economy, already weakened by Portuguese competition in eastern trade, faced challenges—bank failures, the cost of subsidizing long wars, and the depletion of precious natural resources—in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.46 This loss of Venice’s terraferma was made worse by the encroaching Ottoman Turks, who had already seized Peloponnesian colonies and Greek islands Negroponte and Lemnos from Venice. In September 1528, the threat was abundantly clear in the Imperial ambassador’s dispatch to Charles V. Encouraging an immediate attack on Venice, he urged the emperor, “Now is the time to root out that venomous plant and strike a blow at people who have always been the promoters of discord among Christian Princes.”47 Thus, with enemies at the gates, the Italian Wars threatened Venetian territory, its people, its economy, and its long-held republican liberty and independence,48 making the careful navigation of these European affairs a matter of survival. Then in 1529, Andrea Gritti, doge from 1523 to 1538, reversed Venetian foreign policy, concluding a treaty with Charles V that removed the Serenissima from direct involvement in the remainder of the Italian Wars and instead prioritized diplomatic negotiations. Gritti understood the potential gains and limitations of both military engagement and diplomacy: as a child, he had accompanied his grandfather on missions to England, France, Spain, and Constantinople, and as an adult, he had fought in the War of the League of Cambrai and served as proveditor of the army.49 Having experienced an interdict in 1509 and the expense of maintaining an army for so long, Gritti and his electors believed it was now time to pursue diplomatic options rather than continued military aggression. Diplomatic avenues soon became the modus operandi for Italian interactions with western powers, prompting Bernardo Navagero, ambassador to Charles V and Pope Paul IV, to remark in 1558, “Wars

45 Stephen D. Bowd, Renaissance Mass Murder: Civilians and Soldiers during the Italian Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 70. 46 Bouwsma, Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty, 96–97. 47 Calendar of State Papers, Spain, ed. Pascual de Gayangos (London, 1877), 3:793.

September 21, 1528. 48 Robert Finlay, “The Immortal Republic: The Myth of Venice During the Italian Wars (1494–1530),” The Sixteenth Century Journal 30 (1999): 936. 49 John Julius Norwich, A History of Venice (New York: Knopf, 1982), 438.

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should always be avoided.”50 However, without resistance from the Venetian military, Charles V continued to conquer territories in the Italian peninsula, seizing Florence in 1530 and repelling the French to hold Milan in 1542. By Mary’s accession in 1553, Venice was the last major Italian power not yet under Habsburg influence. Venice and the other Italian states, so pitted against the resources and might of vast kingdoms, depended on precarious alliances of often-changing international partners, including England, to adjust the balance of power in Italy without committing Venetian soldiers or wealth. Previously, England had participated in the Holy Leagues organized by Julius II (r. 1503–1513) and Leo X (r. 1513–1521) to curb the expansion of France and the Holy Roman Empire, respectively. England, like Venice, was caught amidst Habsburg-Valois competition and, as such, Venetian leadership hoped, could be maneuvered to maintain the balance between French and Imperial presence in Italy and prevent the loss of Venetian independence. In addition to these political concerns, Venice was also keenly cognizant of the religious implications of Mary’s reign. Her reconciliation with Rome received commendation from the Venetians, as well as from other Italians, and Doge Francesco Venier personally wrote to Mary to offer his congratulations on her restoration of Catholicism.51 It is important to note, however, that unlike Reginald Pole’s emphasis on doctrinal matters, the Venetian ambassadors expressed support of Mary’s defense of Catholicism from a decidedly political lens.52 The Venetian ambassadors associated the Reformation with irreparable social and political disruption more than heresy because it upheaved order rooted in Catholic tradition. Soranzo asserted that “with so many variations and

50 Qtd. in Bouwsma, Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty, 109. 51 CSP Venetian, 6:3–4. January 5, 1555. 52 The complicated interplay of religion and politics throughout the early modern period has prompted a rich dialogue in scholarship of the English Reformation. Anthony Fletcher and Diarmaid MacCulloch have argued correctly that political and religious motives cannot be fully separated and must be understood within the same immersive religious culture. Within this dynamic, however, D. M. Loades recognized greater emphasis on politics than religion as motivation in Tudor conspiracies, including those against Mary. In this case specific to Venetian interests, the ambassadors expressed more attention to the Reformation’s role in inspiring political unrest, rather than celebrating Mary’s suppression of religious heresy during the persecutions. See: Fletcher and MacCulloch, Tudor Rebellions, 6th ed. (New York: Routledge, 2016); Loades, Two Tudor Conspiracies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1965).

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changes that have been made, [the English] do not know what to believe or on what to base their faith.”53 Even Giovanni Michiel’s account of the Marian persecutions is remarkably devoid of discussion regarding the religious justification for the burning of heretics in 1555. He credited Mary’s arrest of Protestant leaders in Cambridgeshire in March as her effort to suppress a potential insurgence, after reports arrived of local Protestants amassing arms and planning to march on London.54 Michiel wrote that the insurgents acted only “under the pretext of religion” and planned to “kindle such a flame and cause such confusion as in their power to the detriment and perhaps utter ruin of the King and Queen.”55 Later in April, he described the recent burning of Stephen Knight, William Pygot, and others in Essex as nearly causing a violent Protestant retaliation against the baron of Dacre who carried out the execution.56 Several other passages likewise identify anxiety over the wide, popular reach of Protestant leaders, whose devotees threatened revolt by missionary activity or martyrdom. Venice certainly recognized Mary’s reconciliation with Rome as a spiritual triumph, but diplomatic records indicate that the ambassadors equated Mary’s planned Catholic uniformity with stability and expressed more concern for the political fallout of religious unrest, rather than the theological issues at stake. Mary’s religious policies had unintended consequences in Venice that complicated their own domestic condition. While Venetians like Michiel celebrated England’s apparent victory over Protestantism,57 Mary’s restoration of Catholicism drove into exile a number of Englishmen with connections to either Northumberland’s or Wyatt’s revolts, who formed a community of refugees in the Veneto. Their number included Edward Courtenay, the queen’s cousin who was implicated in Wyatt’s Rebellion, and Peter Carew, who fled to avoid arrest (at least temporarily) for his involvement in the attempted coup. Kenneth R. Bartlett has argued that these exiles sought refuge in Venice out of political, not religious,

53 Relazione di Giocomo Soranzo, 70. 54 CSP Venetian, 6:30–31. March 26, 1555. 55 CSP Venetian, 6:31. March 26, 1555. 56 CSP Venetian, 6:45. April 8, 1555. 57 CSP Venetian, 5:598. December 28, 1554.

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opposition to Mary.58 Anne Overell has since suggested that although the refugees were nearly all associated with the reform movement, they selected Venice to give appearances of neutrality, that their exile in an antiHabsburg but Catholic city was neither political nor religious, chosen as “a place that would not make things worse.”59 Regardless of the motive for choosing Venice as their destination, the refugees were a Protestant presence in Catholic Venice, which was already combating clandestine book trade and enemies of the Inquisition.60 English diplomats like Edmund Harvel formed an alliance with Italian reformers, turning the English embassy in Venice into a hub for Protestant energy.61 More than doctrinal divide, the Venetian state feared the political repercussions of the reformers’ presence by complicating foreign relations with Mary and destabilizing Catholic order, both in a social and spiritual sense, in Venice, just as they identified in England. The impact of Mary’s political and religious policies certainly influenced Venetian security, but Venice also had direct relations with England that necessitated close diplomatic ties. Trade between the Serenissima and England had been important to both parties’ commerce for the previous 250 years. In 1304, an act recorded in the Libri Commemoriali granted rights to free trade to Venetian merchants in London, and a 1398 decree gave Venetians priority when shipping.62 Generally, England imported wine, coral, books, and silks, both raw and dyed, from Venice and capitalized on their trade with the east, buying spices like cinnamon, saffron, and pepper. England, in turn, exported wool and other cloths, tin, and pewter to Venice. There was not always peace in the market, however. In addition to frequent disputes over duties imposed on Candian wine, the 58 Kenneth R. Bartlett, “The English Exile Community in Italy and the Political Opposition to Queen Mary I,” Albion 13 (1981): 224, 230. See also Bartlett, The English in Italy: 1525–1558, A Study in Culture and Politics (Geneva: Slatkine, 1991). 59 Anne Overell, “Venetian Exile and English Propaganda,” in Italian Reform and English Reformations, c. 1535–c. 1585 (Burlington: Ashgate, 2008), 127–128. 60 Paul F. Grendler, “The Clandestine Book Trade,” in The Roman Inquisition and the Venetian Press, 1540–1605 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 182–200. 61 Diego Pirillo, The Refugee Diplomat: Venice, England, and the Reformation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018), 14. 62 Salter, Tudor England through Venetian Eyes, 21, 25.

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Evil Mayday of 1517 reflects the resentment of English workers toward foreign merchants that led to violence. John Lincoln, a broker and one of the riot’s organizers, made clear the grievances of the English workers: [T]he English merchants could have no utterance; for the merchant strangers brought in all silks, cloth of gold, wine, oil, iron, and such other merchandize, that no man almost buyeth of an Englishman. And also outward they carry so much English wool, tin, and lead, that Englishmen that aventure outward can have no living.63

Given that those exact products were the chief exports of Venetian merchants, it is interesting then that ambassador Sebastian Giustinian sharply lists those foreign merchants whose homes were attacked: the French, Flemish, Florentine, Lucchese, and Genoese but not the Venetians. “No demonstration was made against the houses of the Venetians,” he assured the Signoria, “as they have ever conducted themselves with equity and decorum.”64 Ambassadors, therefore, had to make clear appeals to authorities to foster favorable economic treatment and influence English markets to desire and protect trade with the Republic. In one case, Michiel gifted a gown made of Venetian silk to Mary, which she had requested. In her gratitude, Mary addressed the ladies of her court, merchants, and others present and “said so many things in English…as clearly to show that what she had received she liked very much.”65 Appealing to Mary’s affinity for expensive dresses, the ambassador attempted to curry favor with the queen and simultaneously boost market demand for Venetian products among those courtiers under her influence. The communication between Venice’s four ambassadors stationed at Mary’s court and the Republic reveals those political issues under Mary most concerning for Venetian security, especially the continental impact of her Habsburg marriage. In January 1527, Domenico Venier, envoy in Rome from spring 1526 to autumn 1527, had articulated the significance of any Tudor marital alliance when he informed the Signoria of Princess Mary’s then-proposed union with Francis I. Even as Clement 63 Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII , volume 2, ed. J. S. Brewer (London: Longman & Co, 1864), ccxi. 64 CSP Venetian, 3:382. May 5, 1517. 65 CSP Venetian, 6:186. September 13, 1555.

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VII negotiated a truce with Charles V in the Italian Wars, Venier reported that Cardinal Wolsey had been “unable to mediate between France and the Emperor” and “consent[ed] to the marriage in order that the war may be greater.”66 In a letter the following month to Gasparo Spinelli, the Venetian secretary in England, Andrea Gritti described the ongoing conflict in the peninsula as “the preservation of the liberty of Italy” and expressed the “hope to soon hear that his most Christian Majesty’s marriage with the Princess of England has been concluded, a result honourable for both their Majesties, apposite for the common weal of Italy and of all Christendom, and beyond measure desired by the State.”67 The doge and Signoria relied on its ambassadors abroad to promote a marriage option for Mary that would be most favorable to Italian securities. Jehan Scheyfve, the Imperial ambassador in 1553, reported that the Venetians were conspiring with the Duke of Northumberland to negotiate a marriage between Mary and the eldest son of the Duke of Ferrara to oppose Habsburg influence.68 Although the matter appeared before his Council in February, Edward’s continued illness and Mary’s flat insistence to Scheyfve that “she had so little inclination to marriage” prevented its full pursuit.69 Despite its failure to result in a wedding, the Venetian-backed proposal indicates how seriously the Republic responded to Mary’s potential effect on the Continent and demonstrates Venetian diplomats’ history of recognizing Mary’s marriage as relevant to international, and especially Italian, politics. Soranzo then certainly understood the stakes in 1554 when it became clear that Mary intended to marry not a French suitor as Henry VIII had planned but the son of the Holy Roman Emperor. Catholic, widowed with a son, and set to inherit Charles V’s holdings in Naples, Spain, and the Netherlands, Philip’s involvement risked foreign interference in English affairs and prompted Parliament’s April 1554 Marriage Act to limit his authority and ensure that England would not become absorbed into Habsburg control. In his relazione, Soranzo described in detail the English people’s fear that “it might easily come to pass that [Mary]

66 CSP Venetian, 4:8. January 29, 1527. 67 CSP Venetian, 4:18. February 5, 1527. 68 CSP Spain, 11:9. February 17, 1553. 69 CSP Spain, 11:9. February 17, 1553.

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would marry an alien and place the country under foreign jurisdiction.”70 “Everyone,” he continued, was “above all desirous that she should marry an Englishman, and by no means a foreigner,” and when Parliament voiced their concerns, “not only did she reply ungraciously, but without allowing them to even conclude their address, rebuked them for their audacity, in daring to speak to her their Queen about marriage, saying, however, that she would consult with God, and with no one else, which greatly disturbed everybody.”71 While Parliament’s concerns largely centered around losing governing power to their queen’s husband, the Venetians feared the completion of a Habsburg ring around France, on which the Republic depended to keep Habsburg ambitions in Italy in check. Simon Renard, Holy Roman Imperial ambassador from 1553 to 1558, wrote that Italian merchants from Florence, Genoa, and Venice, who operated in London, all believed the marriage “would mean their ruin.”72 With these concerns in mind, the Venetian ambassadors exploited the dissenting English subjects who also opposed the union. Whether through his own initiative or with the tacit approval of the Signoria, Soranzo conspired with the French ambassador Antoine de Noailles to aid Wyatt’s Rebellion and prevent the Habsburg marriage. Harbison and D. M. Loades have thoroughly explored Noailles’ role: instrumental in coordinating with the conspirators, he served as liaison between Wyatt’s faction and France to secure their assistance in blocking Philip’s arrival. Soon after Sir John Leigh informed him of the proposed union on the night of September 6, 1553, Noailles approached Soranzo and framed the whole affair in an appeal to Italian priorities: any marriage between Philip and Mary would weaken French resistance to Charles V in Italy.73 Without surviving dispatches between London and Venice, it is difficult to ascertain the extent of Soranzo’s involvement, but by September 18, Renard wrote to Charles V, “I take it your Majesty realises that as long as the French and Venetian ambassadors remain here we must expect them to perform evil offices.”74 He accused Noailles and Soranzo of “always plotting,” stating that Soranzo’s house was “full of spies, 70 CSP Venetian, 5:536. August 18, 1554. 71 CSP Venetian, 5:560. August 18, 1554. 72 CSP Spain, 12:31. January 18, 1554. 73 Harbison, Rival Ambassadors, 79. 74 CSP Spain, 13:50. September 18, 1554.

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English and Italian,”75 and that Soranzo was “plotting by every means in his power with the French ambassador to incite the people to revolt.”76 He flatly concluded that “I can assure your Majesty that they [the Venetians] are even worse than the French.”77 Habsburg agents understood the Venetians were attempting to steer English politics in Italian favor. By early 1554, as Wyatt and Carew began to assemble their forces, documented encounters between the rebels and Venetian agents are more apparent. In late January, Wyatt met a messenger from Flanders who was carrying ciphered letters from Doge Francesco Venier to Soranzo,78 and a Venetian ship anchored in the Thames supplied the rebels with five or six pieces of artillery.79 Soranzo was summoned before the queen the following month but denied the charges, insisting that the rebels had seized the weapons by force and had not acquired heavy artillery but only some swords and guns, arguably still a vital contribution to the ill-equipped rebels.80 Unfortunately for Soranzo, Mary and her Council produced a double agent, a certain Giovanni Bernardino, who provided witness to Soranzo’s culpability.81 Renard further speculated that the conspirators engineered the entire plot to plant Courtenay on the throne at the Venetian embassy to avoid the suspicion of his presence at Noailles’ residence.82 In response, Mary demanded Soranzo’s recall, but the Council of Ten waited several months before selecting a replacement. Bartlett has proposed that the Signoria’s delay and the exile of both Carew and Courtenay in Venice indicate the state was likely complicit in these anti-Habsburg activities in England.83 Furthermore, the Signoria’s censures against Soranzo’s behavior were tempered by praise for his 75 CSP Spain, 13:64. October 13, 1554. 76 CSP Spain, 12:32. January 18, 1554. 77 CSP Spain, 12:33. January 18, 1554. It is worth mentioning that Imperial ambas-

sadors were frequently suspicious of Soranzo’s activities and his relationship with the French. Scheyfve, Renard’s immediate predecessor, believed that Soranzo had once spoken to him just “in order to get something out of M. Scheyfve and report his words to the Duke of Northumberland or the French ambassador.” CSP Spain, 11:83. July 11, 1553. 78 CSP Spain, 12:88. February 8, 1554. 79 CSP Spain, 12:88. February 8, 1554. 80 CSP Spain, 12:122. February 20, 1554. 81 Bartlett, “The English Exile Community in Italy,” 232. 82 CSP Spain, 12:123. February 20, 1554. 83 Bartlett, “The English Exile Community in Italy,” 229–230.

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work in London. In March 1554, the Council of Ten recognized that the emperor suspected Soranzo of “having performed some evil office in the matter of the marriage…and against the Spanish nation.”84 Yet, later that month, when notifying Soranzo of his replacement and orders to return to Venice, the doge and Senate informed him that they were “well satisfied with him, and commend the diligence and prudence which he displayed in such matters as he had to treat during his legation.”85 In fact, rather than delivering criticism or punishment for his involvement with the conspirators, upon Soranzo’s return to Venice in 1554, the Council of Ten reassigned him to the Venetian embassy in France where he continued to build on the relations he had made in England. Given the state’s careful regulation of its ambassadors, these events suggest that the Signoria knew and possibly sanctioned Soranzo’s actions, or at least was not as displeased as they articulated for the sake of appeasing Mary. Regardless of whether they approved of the insurrection against Mary, after Soranzo’s apparent support of the rebellion, the Venetian Senate prioritized establishing friendly relations with England, Spain, and the Holy Roman Empire and refused to engage in such overt machinations that might threaten their influence in Mary’s court. In repeated messages, even before his departure from Venice, the doge instructed Michiel to congratulate Mary both on her triumph over the insurgents and on her upcoming wedding.86 For his part, Charles V had hoped Soranzo’s discovered involvement in Wyatt’s Rebellion would force a shift to more passive politics from Venice. In a letter dated February 18, 1554, he advised that the queen “write to the doge and the Seignory of Venice asking them to change their ambassador on the ground that he has been implicated, she supposes without their knowledge…[and] failed in his duty as a public person. Such demonstrations as these will cause other ambassadors to proceed more carefully.”87 In March, the Council of Ten reminded Michiel that Venetian diplomats were expected to act with impartiality and ordered him to “proceed alike with the ministers,

84 CSP Venetian, 5:474. March 6, 1554. 85 CSP Venetian, 5:476. March 27, 1554. 86 CSP Venetian, 5:472, 475. February 29, 1554; March 27, 1554. 87 CSP Spain, 12:113. February 18, 1554.

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both of the Emperor and of the most Christian King, so that the one may not suspect him of being more inclined to the other.”88 Michiel was apparently more successful in these endeavors than his predecessor: Harbison mentions that Renard and Gilles de Noailles both assumed he was in the other’s favor.89 Throughout her reign, the Venetian ambassadors’ reports portray Mary as serious, devoted to both her religion and her realm, and dogged in her desire to produce a Catholic heir. This was, in effect, the double-edged sword for Italians staking their hopes on Mary: the Habsburg marriage that so threatened the security of Venice was also the means to produce a Catholic heir and ensure the continuation of English reconciliation with Rome. Michiel sent regular updates to the Senate concerning Mary’s false pregnancy in 1555. In late April, rumors of the birth of a son led to public celebration, bonfires, and processions from the churches until news came from court that no delivery had occurred.90 In May, Federico Badoer, while still serving as ambassador to the emperor, sent a message in cipher to the Senate that dissenters in England were slandering both Mary and Philip and spreading rumors that Mary had died in childbirth.91 It was shortly after this that Michiel reported that the physicians believed Mary’s labor was imminent,92 but by June there was still no child and her doctors began to claim they had miscalculated her term.93 By the end of the month, even Mary’s ladies were refraining from speculating when the baby would come, deciding “as in all her Majesty’s other circumstances, which the more they were despaired…the better and more auspicious did their result then show itself thus fully proving to the world that they were regulated exclusively by Divine Providence.”94 In the several months he followed news of the apparent pregnancy, Michiel appears sympathetic to the queen and conscious of the significance of the child. He wished for the successful delivery, “should it please God to render it in the end such as is desired and hoped for by 88 CSP Venetian, 5:476. March 28, 1554. 89 Harbison, “French Intrigue at the Court of Queen Mary,” 539. 90 CSP Venetian, 6:60–61. May 6, 1555. 91 CSP Venetian, 6:73–74. May 19, 1555. 92 CSP Venetian, 6:77. May 21, 1555. 93 CSP Venetian, 6:98. June 6, 1555. 94 CSP Venetian, 6:120. June 26, 1555.

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all good men.”95 Despite assurances from physicians and Mary’s ladies that it was “undeniable, and beyond a doubt, from many manifest signs that the Queen is certainly pregnant,” surprise that the delivery had not yet occurred began to turn to skepticism, and it became increasingly clear that the pregnancy was not real.96 In one particular gaff, a Polish ambassador arrived in London, offering his congratulations for the birth until he realized it still had not yet taken place.97 After the queen moved to Oatlands to escape the scrutiny of a watching, waiting court, even Michiel had to admit that “the hope of childbirth has so diminished that but little reliance can now be any longer placed on it” and that “the pregnancy will end in wind rather than anything else.”98 With the loss of this anticipated pregnancy, the future of Mary’s Catholic succession became uncertain. Producing an heir was more than an issue of regular succession, as it was necessary to preserve the restoration of Catholicism that Mary had achieved. Pole perhaps made this point best when he wrote that the pope “reaped the first fruit of the honour of this return, of which the Queen may be said to have been the mother.”99 Reconciliation with Rome was the legacy Mary had birthed, but without an actual heir, its survival was at risk. When rumors of another pregnancy circulated in 1558, the Venetian ambassadors reveal Mary was this time more cautious. Certainly, the Venetians wanted to avoid investing energy in another false pregnancy, and perhaps by this point, they already anticipated an alternative heir for the 42-year-old queen. Surian informed the Senate that the queen had chosen to keep the pregnancy secret until it was absolutely confirmed, to avoid the scandal and disappointment she had experienced those years before.100 When this pregnancy also failed to develop and her health rapidly declined, her mental state deteriorated until “anxieties…harass[ed] her more than the disease.”101 In her final months,

95 CSP Venetian, 6:140. July 23, 1555. 96 CSP Venetian, 6:140. July 23, 1555. 97 CSP Venetian, 6:126. July 1, 1555. 98 CSP Venetian, 6:147. August 5, 1555. 99 CSP Venetian, 6:1393. December 14, 1557. 100 CSP Venetian, 6:1427. January 15, 1558. 101 CSP Venetian, 6:1544. November 12, 1558.

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Mary tried to prevent her half-sister from assuming the throne, quite harshly denouncing Elizabeth: [T]he Queen [was] utterly averse to give Lady Elizabeth any hope of the succession, obstinately maintaining that she was neither her sister nor the daughter of the Queen’s father, King Henry, nor would she ever hear of favouring her, as she was born of an infamous woman, who had so greatly outraged the Queen her mother and herself.

Mary, as well as the Venetian observers in her court, understood that Elizabeth’s succession meant a return to Protestantism and the undoing of her religious work. However, it soon became clear that Elizabeth was her only heir, and Surian and the other foreign ambassadors at court waited for news of Mary’s death and Elizabeth’s accession. On November 28, Michiel informed the Senate of Mary’s death eleven days before. Pointedly, he noted the joy in the French court over this news and the renewed hope that Mary’s absence would mean a change in fortune for French expansion in Italy.102 Without an heir from the union that had caused so much discontent, Mary had failed to ensure Catholic succession—the loss, to follow Pole’s analogy, of the only child she had produced. In his same letter describing Mary’s death, Surian reported that he did not yet have any information concerning the marriage of the new queen, as if to return England to its same state of being as five years before.103 After stationing a resident ambassador in London for more than 50 years, English-Venetian diplomatic interaction was already in decline by the final year of Mary’s reign when Surian and his embassy left London to follow Philip. Despite the occasional interest Venice expressed in deploying ambassadors, it would not send another embassy to London until 1603, and this stemmed mostly from pressure to complain about English piracy rather than any desire to resume close diplomatic ties.104 With the Italian Wars finally concluded in 1559, there simply was not a need to maintain an embassy in London. England’s assumed importance in Venetian security had apparently passed. Mary’s reign, therefore, 102 CSP Venetian, 6:1560–1561. November 28, 1558. 103 CSP Venetian, 6:1562. November 30, 1558. 104 For an assessment of the acts of piracy leading to doge’s deployment of envoys to

Elizabeth in 1603, see Mark Chadwick, Piracy and the Origins of Universal Jurisdiction: On Stranger Tides? (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 72–76.

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serves as a unique window into Venetian understanding of England’s role in international affairs during a period of religious and political crisis. By recentering studies of Marian diplomacy to include underexamined states like Venice, we can gain a greater appreciation of the political and religious significance of Mary’s court and how the critical issues of her tenure, including her faith, opportunities for Imperial expansion, and heir, shifted European attention to London—and Mary—as the center of international engagement.

Bibliography Primary Sources Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts Relating to English Affairs, Existing in the Archives and Collections of Venice, and in Other Libraries of Northern Italy, edited by Rawdon Brown. Vols. 1–6. London: Longman & Co., 1864–1884. Calendar of State Papers, Spain, edited by G. A. Bergenroth, Pascual de Gayangos, and Royall Tyler. Vol. 1–13. London, 1862–1954. Grumello, Antonio. Cronaca. Milan: Francesco Colombo, 1856. Le Relazioni degli Ambasciatori Veneti al Senato, edited by Eugenio Albèri. Vols. 1–15. Florence: Società Editrice Fiorentina, 1839–1863. Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII , edited by J. S. Brewer. Vol 2. London: Longman & Co., 1864. Trevisan, A Relation, or Rather a True Account of the Island of England: with Sundry Particulars of the Customs of these People, and of the Royal Revenues under King Henry the Seventh, about the Year 1500, edited by Charlotte A. Sneyd. London, 1847.

Secondary Sources Bartlett, Kenneth R. “The English Exile Community in Italy and the Political Opposition to Queen Mary I.” Albion 13, no. 3 (1981): 223–241. ———. The English in Italy: 1525–1558, A Study in Culture and Politics. Geneva: Slatkine, 1991. Bouwsma, William J. Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty: Renaissance Values in the Age of the Counter Reformation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968. Bowd, Stephen D. Renaissance Mass Murder: Civilians and Soldiers during the Italian Wars. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Domnina, Ekaterina G. “‘The Riches of England Are Greater Than Those of Any Other Country in Europe’: A Venetian Image of Early Modern England.” In

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Mighty Europe, 1400–1700: Writing an Early Modern Continent, edited by Andrew W. Hiscock. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007. Finlay, Robert. “The Immortal Republic: The Myth of Venice During the Italian Wars (1494–1530).” The Sixteenth Century Journal 30, no. 4 (1999): 931– 944. Fletcher, Anthony and Diarmaid MacCulloch. Tudor Rebellions, 6th ed. New York: Routledge, 2016. Fletcher, Catherine. Diplomacy in Renaissance Rome: The Rise of the Resident Ambassador. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Frigo, Daniela, ed. Politics and Diplomacy in Early Modern Italy: The Structure of Diplomatic Practice, 1450–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Grendler, Paul F. The Roman Inquisition and the Venetian Press, 1540–1605. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977. Harbison, E. Harrison. “French Intrigue at the Court of Queen Mary.” The American Historical Review 45 (1940): 533–551. ———. Rival Ambassadors at the Court of Queen Mary. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1940. Hill, David Jayne. A History of Diplomacy in the International Development of Europe. Vol. 2. London: Longman & Co., 1914. Krueger, Christine L. “Why She Lived at the PRO: Mary Anne Everett Green and the Profession of History.” Journal of British Studies 42, no. 1 (2003): 65–90. Lazzarini, Isabella. Communication and Conflict: Italian Diplomacy in the Early Renaissance, 1350–1520. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Levin, Michael J. Spanish Ambassadors in Sixteenth-Century Venice. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. Loades, D. M. Two Tudor Conspiracies. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1965. Mallett, Michael and Christine Shaw. The Italian Wars, 1494–1559. London: Pearson, 2012. Mattingly, Garrett. Renaissance Diplomacy (1955). Reprint London: J. Cape, 1962. Norwich, John Julius. A History of Venice. New York: Knopf, 1982. Overell, Anne. Italian Reform and English Reformations, c. 1535–c. 1585. Burlington: Ashgate, 2008. Pirillo, Diego. The Refugee Diplomat: Venice, England, and the Reformation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018. Queller, Donald E. “The Development of Ambassadorial Relazioni.” In Renaissance Venice, edited by J. R. Hale, 174–196. London: Faber & Faber, 1973.

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———. “Early Venetian Legislation Concerning Foreign Ambassadors.” Studies in the Renaissance 12 (1965): 7–17. Salter, Emma Gurney. Tudor England through Venetian Eyes. London: Williams & Norgate, 1930. Wyatt, Michael. The Italian Encounter with Tudor England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Zimmerman, T. C. Price. Paolo Giovio: The Historian and the Crisis of SixteenthCentury Italy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.

A Narrative That Was Not Her Own: Mary I as Mediterranean Queen Darcy Kern

Mary Tudor was the queen of Naples and Spain. Nearly every biography of her mentions her acquisition of these Mediterranean kingdoms through her marriage to Philip Habsburg, later Philip II of Spain, but they say little about her role as queen.1 In the modern historiography of the Kingdom of Naples, finding a reference to her as queen of Naples is 1 See, for example, Anna Whitelock, Mary Tudor: England’s First Queen (London: Bloomsbury, 2009), 237–239; Judith M. Richards, Mary Tudor (New York: Routledge, 2008), 142–160; David Loades, Mary Tudor: A Life (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 224–226; H. F. M. Prescott, A Spanish Tudor (London: Constable, 1940), 351–352. The emphasis on Mary’s rule in England to the exclusion of her Mediterranean kingdoms is complicated by the surviving sources. Both the Spanish and Neapolitan archives have suffered extensive losses. Philip’s chancellery documents were lost on his return to Spain in 1559, while German soldiers destroyed the State Archives of Naples at Montesano Villa in World War II.

D. Kern (B) Southern Connecticut State University, New Haven, CT, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 V. Schutte and J. S. Hower (eds.), Writing Mary I, Queenship and Power, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95132-0_5

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extremely rare.2 Spanish historian María Jesús Pérez Martín called Mary “the great unknown queen” because centuries of English Protestant historiography has obscured the reality of her reign.3 Pérez Martín argued that her own work, “with great objectivity,” would recover Mary’s true context and “formidable personality,”4 but she wrote a fairly traditional biography of her as queen of England. Some British historians, notably Alexander Samson and John Edwards, have made significant contributions to our understanding of Mary within a broader Iberian context, but for most the focus has been on her reign in England.5 Ironically, many British historians have echoed early Spanish criticism of Mary by using sexualized and gendered terms for her and her reign rather than following early English accounts, which tended to criticize her Catholicism and Spanish heritage.6 Geoffrey Elton described her as “arrogant, assertive, bigoted, stubborn, suspicious and (not to put too fine a point on it) rather stupid. Her portraits show her a bitter and narrow-minded woman, curiously unlike her father, brother, and sister. She had ever been her mother’s daughter rather than her father’s; devoid of political skill, unable to compromise, set only on the wholesale reversal of a generation’s history.”7 A. F. Pollard argued that “sterility was the conclusive note of

2 None of the following mentions Mary: Céline Duvard, Church and State in Spanish Italy: Rituals and Legitimacy in the Kingdom of Naples (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020); Thomas James Dandelet and John A. Marino, eds., Spain in Italy: Politics, Society, and Religion 1500–1700 (Boston: Brill, 2007); Pier Luigi Rovito, Il viceregno spagnolo di Napoli: Ordinamento, Istituzioni, Culture di Governo (Naples: Arte Tipgrafica, 2003). None of these books mentions Mary. 3 María Jesús Pérez Martín, María Tudor: La Gran Reina Desconocida (Madrid: Ediciones Rialp, 2018). All translations are mine unless otherwise noted. 4 Pérez Martín, María Tudor, 20. 5 Alexander Samson, Mary and Philip: The Marriage of Tudor England and Habsburg

Spain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020); John Edwards, Mary I: England’s Catholic Queen (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011). 6 For examples of early English accounts of her reign, see John Foxe, Acts and Monumentes of These Latter and Perilous Days (London, 1563); Thomas Dekker and John Webster, The Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyat with the Coronation of Queen Mary, and the Coming in of King Philip (London: Edward Allde for Thomas Archer, 1607). 7 G. R. Elton, Reform and Reformation: England, 1509–1558 (London: Edward Arnold, 1977), 376.

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Mary’s reign.”8 Similarly, Conyers Read called her reign “a barren interlude” between the fertile reigns of her father and siblings.9 David Loades described her as “a profoundly conventional woman” whose limitations as a ruler were mainly imposed upon her “by her sex.”10 John Guy declared that “her piety and unmarried state [upon her accession] gave her the intensity of a nun.”11 Glyn Redworth claimed that Mary’s “most potent” propaganda weapon was “her purity.” Had she remained unmarried, she could have portrayed herself as a virgin queen like her sister Elizabeth did with great success in the 1570s and 1580s.12 This reads history backward. The most obvious precedent for a queen regnant and consort that Mary had at her disposal was her grandmother Isabel of Castile, who used masculine terminology, insisted on joint symbolism with her husband Ferdinand of Aragon, and successfully conquered the Kingdom of Granada (1492), which was subsumed into Castile, her kingdom, not the Crown of Aragon, which belonged to Ferdinand.13 Pérez Martín, Samson, Edwards, and Judith Richards have pushed back against the gendered tropes common to Marian scholarship. They note that the queen was a learned humanist and a capable monarch, particularly amidst the uncertainty at the beginning of her reign,14 but

8 A. F. Pollard, The History of England from the Accession of Edward VI to the Death of Elizabeth (1547 –1603) (London: Longmans Green, 1910; reprinted New York, 1969), 172. 9 Conyers Read, The Tudors: Personalities and Practical Politics in 16th Century England (New York: H. Holt, 1936; reprinted Freeport Books for Libraries, 1968), 144. 10 Loades, Mary Tudor, 8. 11 John Guy, Tudor England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 227. 12 Glyn Redworth, “‘Matters Impertinent to Women’: Male and Female Monarchy

under Philip and Mary,” The English Historical Review, 112:447 (Jun., 1997), 598–599. 13 Barbara F. Weissberger, “Tanto monta: The Catholic Monarchs’ Nuptial Fiction and the Power of Isabel I of Castile,” in The Rule of Women in Early Modern Europe, eds. Anne J. Cruz and Mihoko Suzuki (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 43–63. For more on Isabel’s use and control of images for political ends, see Felipe Pereda, Images of Discord: Poetics and Politics of the Sacred Image in Fifteenth-Century Spain, translated by Consuelo López-Morillas (London: Harvey Miller, 2019). 14 See, for example, Samson, Mary and Philip; Edwards, Mary I ; Whitelock, Mary Tudor; Richards, Mary Tudor; Judith M. Richards, “Mary Tudor: Renaissance Queen of England,” in High and Mighty Queens of Early Modern England: Realities and Representations, eds. Carole Levin, Debra Barrett-Graves, and Jo Eldridge Carney (New York:

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Samson observes that “there is something about Mary that has stubbornly resisted the best efforts of scholars over the last three decades to offer a more balanced historical account of her life and achievements.” He blames this not on her gender or sexuality but on “two stories that are fundamental to English national identity and history: the Reformation and the British Empire.”15 A third reason is that she herself failed to control the narrative of her reign in Naples and Spain, where she was a distant, inscrutable figure. She never left England to visit her Mediterranean kingdoms and made little effort to patronize writers, disperse her symbols, send images of herself, or involve herself in their governance. Her real and symbolic absence in the south, and the presence of Doña Juana, Philip’s sister and the capable regent of the Spanish kingdoms in his absence, led to her marginalization. Neapolitans and Spaniards of all ranks knew her only through the reports and writings of elite men who tended to focus on perceptions of her authority as queen regnant in England as well as on her sexuality and physicality, which, as noted above, has had consequences for the historiography of her reign. Mary became queen regnant of England in July 1553. On August 3 she entered London triumphantly with widespread popular support and a large retinue that included her half-sister Elizabeth. Initial reports of her rule in England were cautiously optimistic. Simon Renard, Emperor Charles V’s ambassador, reported to Prince Philip in September that the queen “has a strong hand, [as] some who were mixed up in conspiracies have been taken prisoners, and the other plotters have no means to work out their intent.”16 The conspiracies Renard referred to included that of John Dudley, duke of Northumberland, and Lady Jane Grey, his daughter-in-law, who attempted to seize the throne in contradiction to the Succession Act Parliament had passed in 1543. After arresting many of those involved, the queen, in conjunction with her Privy Council, attended to the internal government of the country, particularly the

Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 27–43; Carole Levin, The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994). 15 Samson, Mary and Philip, 1. 16 The Ambassadors in England to the Emperor, September 4, 1553. “Spain: September

1553, 1–5,” in Calendar of State Papers, Spain, Volume 11, 1553, ed. Royall Tyler (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1916), 197–211. British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/cal-state-papers/spain/vol11/pp197-211.

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coinage, which was “adulterated and debased.” In doing so, Mary was “establishing herself firmly upon the throne.” However, she had to proceed with caution, especially in religious affairs. Had she moved too quickly or too assertively in re-establishing Catholicism, she might have faced overwhelming resistance. She held Mass at court but did not compel anyone to attend.17 Personally, according to Renard, she was prudent and virtuous.18 This early assessment of her steadily securing her authority with prudence did not last the year. For many years prior to her accession Mary had relied on her Habsburg relatives for security. That dynamic continued after she became queen. When the prospect of marriage arose in 1553, she again looked to her cousins for a suitable partner and settled on Philip at the emperor’s suggestion.19 It was a political marriage—had they had a child, the Habsburg territories would have surrounded France. As is well known, English resistance to the Anglo-Spanish alliance was strong.20 Mary, however, persisted in her desire to marry Philip. During the marriage negotiations he was not her equal in status, as she was a queen regnant and he a prince (infante) of Spain. In order to elevate his son to equal status, Charles ceded the Kingdom of Naples to him before he arrived in England to celebrate his marriage.21 Because the papacy held Naples as overlord, the emperor had to request that Pope Julius III invest his son with the kingdom. Fortunately, Julius had long been an ally of the emperor and granted the request. Philip repeated the request when he appointed Don Francesco d’Ávalos, marquis of Pescara, and Don Juan Manrique de Lara as his representatives to swear vassalage and obedience to the pope. Philip’s investiture as king of Naples formally occurred on October 19, 17 The Ambassadors in England to the Emperor, September 4, 1553. “Spain: September 1553, 1–5,” in CSP, Spain, 11:197–211. British History Online, http://www.british-his tory.ac.uk/cal-state-papers/spain/vol11/pp197-211. 18 Simon Renard to Prince Philip, October 29, 1553. “Spain: October 1553, 26–31,” in CSP, Spain, 11:316–331. British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/calstate-papers/spain/vol11/pp316-331. 19 Simon Renard to the Bishop of Arras, August 15, 1553. “Spain: August 1553, 11–

20,” in CSP, Spain, 11:162–176. British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac. uk/cal-state-papers/spain/vol11/pp162-176. 20 Samson, Mary and Philip, 52–81. 21 Henry Kamen, Philip of Spain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 57.

Charles’s personal envoy Juan de Figueroa, regent of Naples, brought the news to England. Edwards, Mary I , 189.

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1554 and was communicated to the emperor ten days later. The official transfer of power took place at a public Consistory on October 23,22 three months after Mary and Philip’s marriage on July 25. Despite the official delay, Philip was considered a king when he wed. According to Mary and Philip’s marriage treaty, “The Queen shall, in virtue of the marriage, be admitted to share in the realms and dominions, present and future, of the Prince, as long as the marriage endures.”23 Mary thus became queen consort of Naples by gift and statement in July and by her husband’s formal investiture in October. That Mary was never crowned queen of Naples or Spain had little bearing on her status. Philip, after all, was never crowned king of England and yet was treated as such. Other than using her formulaic title, though, Mary rarely mentioned Naples in official documents. Philip’s own authority there was not what he thought it should be. He had never been to Naples and complained that the governor there still sent to the emperor for instructions instead of asking him.24 Further, few Neapolitans traveled in Philip’s retinue or served in the Spanish government in Naples. For these reasons and by her own choice not to get involved in Naples, Mary made little impression there. One Neapolitan did look to Mary as a source of relief from Habsburg rule in his homeland. Simon Renard reported that shortly before Mary and Philip’s wedding, Giulio Cesare Brancaccio, a Neapolitan courtier, appeared at Mary’s court at Farnham in Surrey with seven or eight servants, including a lute-playing page. Brancaccio had defected from the 22 José Ignacio Tellechea Idígoras, “Fray Bartolomé Carranza: A Spanish Dominican in the England of Mary Tudor,” in Reforming Catholicism in the England of Mary Tudor: The Achievement of Friar Bartolomé Carranza, eds. John Edwards and Ronald Truman (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), 28. 23 January 1, 1554. “Spain: January 1554, 1–10,” in Calendar of State Papers,

Spain, Volume 12, 1554, ed. Royall Tyler (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1949), 1–20. British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/cal-state-papers/ spain/vol11/pp1-20. Neither Philip nor his representatives were present for the marriage negotiations, which were conducted between Mary’s English representatives and Charles V’s imperial ones. When Philip and his Iberian councilors finally saw the treaty, they issued an Ad cautelam on January 4. This legal document guarded their interests in the event of unforeseen contingencies. Op. cit. 24 Francisco de Eraso to Ruy Gómez de Silva, November 30, 1554. “Spain: November 1554, 16–30,” in Calendar of State Papers, Spain, Volume 13, 1554–1558, ed. Royall Tyler (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1954), 96–112. British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/cal-state-papers/spain/vol13/pp96-112.

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emperor’s army and was under orders to return to Naples, but he had no interest in returning. He was among the barons and artists who supported Ferrante Sanseverino, prince of Salerno, who by 1554 was an exile in France. Sanseverino had opposed implementation of the Inquisition in Naples and as a result had clashed with the Spanish government there. Before he left Salerno in 1552, Sanseverino published a treatise explaining his services to the emperor, whom he had fought for many times, and the perceived mistreatment he had received in return. His defection to France created a deep hostility between the Spanish governors of Naples and the Neapolitan barons, Brancaccio included.25 Renard accused Brancaccio of speaking “strangely about the government of Naples, talking of tyranny there in a manner that might do harm here [in England].”26 Supposedly Ascanio Cafarello had advised Brancaccio to speak to a woman from Antwerp in Mary’s chamber. The woman, named Barbara, would give him access to the queen.27 Mary’s Council had him arrested and expelled instead.28 Her marriage was already unpopular with some in England, and reports of a tyrannical Habsburg government in Naples, particularly one that imposed the Inquisition and forced Catholic conformity, would hinder its success even more if they became widespread. Despite Brancaccio’s arrest, rumors about the imposition of the Inquisition in England continued unabated, especially as events subsequent to his appearance suggested that what the Spanish had done in Naples might be creeping into England, which had not had a specialized tribunal for heresy for centuries. Edward VI’s first parliament (1547–1552) had removed the old heresy laws, and there was no widespread support for

25 Christine Shaw, Barons and Castellans: The Military Nobility of Renaissance Italy

(Boston: Brill, 2014), 209. 26 Simon Renard to the Emperor, July 2, 1554. “Spain: July 1554, 1–15,” in CSP, Spain, 12:300–312. British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/cal-state-pap ers/spain/vol12/pp300-312. The original French can be found in Richard Wistreich, Warrior, Courtier, Singer: Giulio Cesare Brancaccio and the Performance of Identity in the Late Renaissance (New York: Ashgate, 2007), 43. 27 Cafarello was one of Renard’s informants. Richard Wistreich argues that the woman was either Barbara Hawke or Barbara Rice. Warrior, Courtier, Singer, 43. 28 Mary had issued a proclamation in February 1554 to expel “seditious aliens” who were “fleeing from the obeisance of the princes and rulers under whom they be born.” Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin, eds., Tudor Royal Proclamations: Vol. 2 The Later Tudors (1553–1587) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), 31.

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reimposing them.29 When the English bishops’ courts started proceedings for heresy against certain people at the end of 1554 and sent the first person to the stake on February 1, 1555, Renard strongly recommended that Philip not allow any further executions to take place. The following Sunday Alfonso de Castro, the king’s confessor, preached a sermon at court that condemned such burnings. However, several Spanish clerics in England, including Friar Bartolomé Carranza de Miranda, a Dominican charged with re-establishing the English Province of the Order of Preachers and serving as the queen’s confessor, supported the English bishops’ campaign against heresy.30 This tension within the Spanish contingent and Mary’s failure as queen regnant of England and consort of Naples to clarify the situation in Naples, draw a distinction between her kingdoms, or perhaps mediate between the Neapolitan barons and their Spanish overlords allowed an already troubled situation to fester.31 As the state of affairs in Naples worsened for Philip, Mary withdrew even further from the kingdom. Pope Julius III died in March 1555 and the “disastrous papal conclave” that followed in May elected Gian Pietro Carafa as pope.32 A Neapolitan by birth, Carafa took the papal name Paul IV. He was “voluble, eccentric, irresponsible [in his pronouncements], with a fiery temper, and a bellicose Italian nationalism.”33 He saw Spain, which he hated more than any other principality, as the oppressor of his homeland. He was soon quarreling with Philip over two ecclesiastical positions: the archbishopric of Naples, which he gave to his nephew, Carlo Carafa, and the vacant archbishopric of Trani.34 Renard charged that the new pope “was threatening to kill all the Spaniards he could catch,” which was a deliberate provocation to war.35 The duke of Alba, Philip’s viceroy in Naples (1556–1558), invaded the Papal States nine

29 Edwards, Mary I , 255–257. 30 Kamen, Philip of Spain, 61–62. 31 Philip himself tried to mediate between the Holy Roman Empire and France for the first nine months of his marriage, so such a move would not have been unfamiliar. Redworth, “Male and Female Monarchy,” 610. 32 Loades, Mary Tudor, 267. 33 Prescott, A Spanish Tudor, 453. 34 Edwards, Mary I , 282–283. 35 Loades, Mary Tudor, 268.

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months later. The pope denounced Philip as a “son of iniquity” and asked the French for assistance in repulsing the Spanish armies.36 Philip needed financial and military support from England, but Mary and her Privy Council were unwilling to help.37 Though this shows her political astuteness in England, it also indicates that she had little interest in “shar[ing] in the realms and dominions…of the Prince,” as her marriage treaty stated.38 Consequently, when Alessandro Andrea, a Neapolitan, wrote his history De la guerra de campaña de Roma, y del Reyno de Napoles: en el Pontificado de Paulo IIII (1589) for Philip thirty years later, he completely left Mary and England out.39 It is unsurprising that Mary’s position in Naples was negligible since her husband’s was weak and oft-contested, but where Philip chose to engage in all of the kingdoms they shared, she did not and so was written out of Neapolitan history. The Iberian response to Mary and her northern kingdom was twofold. Some associated England with the romance and chivalric traditions of King Arthur and Amadís de Gaula,40 but some were unimpressed. The latter believed Mary’s authority in England was less than what it should have been, though this was partly due to the nature of the English themselves. A Spanish gentleman who accompanied Philip complained to a gentleman of Salamanca that

36 Whitelock, Mary Tudor, 286. 37 Philip increasingly saw England as a useless expense and focused on his Conti-

nental territories instead. Federico Badoer, Venetian Ambassador to the Emperor, to the Doge and Senate of Venice, March 15, 1556. “Venice: March 1556, 1–15,” in Calendar of State Papers Relating to English Affairs in the Archives of Venice, Volume 6, 1555–1558, ed. Rawdon Brown (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1877), 361–376. British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/cal-state-papers/ven ice/vol6/pp361-376. 38 January 1, 1554. “Spain: January 1554, 1–10,” in CSP, Spain, 12:1–20. British

History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/cal-state-papers/spain/vol11/pp1-20. 39 Alessandro Andrea, De la guerra de campaña de Roma, y del Reyno de Napoles: en el Pontificado de Paulo IIII, Año de M.D.LVI y LVII (Madrid: Casa de la Viuda de Querino Gerardo, 1589). 40 Alexander Samson, “A Fine Romance: Anglo-Spanish Relations in the Sixteenth Century,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 39:1 (2009), 82–84.

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There are many thieves here, who live on nothing else but the fruits of their theft. We have been warned to go home before it gets dark and stay within doors; for otherwise we have to be very careful if we do not wish to lose our cloaks and our lives. And this is the sort of life we lead here, though the officers of justice severely punish as many robbers as they can catch. Think of it, only the other day they hanged an Englishman here for stealing fourteen pence, which by Castilian reckoning amounts to about 84 maravedies, less than two reales and a half, for the penny (dinero) they use here is worth about six of ours. And in spite of all this severity, there are so many thieves that as I have said no one must walk the streets after night-fall.41

Though there is irony in a Spaniard criticizing the severity of state violence in England, his remarks suggest that it was ineffective against a pervasive crime. Even if such executions were performative to give the ruler the opportunity to show mercy or intended to convey the power of the state or meant as public theater, they were not serving their purpose. This reflected poorly on the queen, who oversaw an unsafe land and a broken justice system. Renard echoed these sentiments. Portraying English society as willfully dysfunctional and the queen as impotent, he wrote, “Since the King [Philip] left this place matters have so changed for the worse that even here in England the people have never been known to be so licentious in word and deed, so eager to outrage foreigners. Nor has it ever seemed more likely that the people would make common cause with the nobility. No attention is paid to the law; the Queen and her Council are neither respected, obeyed nor feared; and each man speaks his mind unashamed.”42 Though the Spaniards prayed that the kingdom 41 A second letter from a Spanish gentleman who accompanied Philip to England, addressed to a gentleman of Salamanca, October 2, 1554. “Spain: October 1554, 1–15,” in CSP, Spain, 13:55–71. British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/calstate-papers/spain/vol13/pp55-71. 42 Simon Renard to the Emperor, September 18, 1554. “Spain: September 1554,” in CSP, Spain, 13:39–55. British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/calstate-papers/spain/vol13/pp39-55. As to outraging foreigners, on August 21, 1554 the Privy Council committed John Cartwright, a servant of the “Countes of Southampton,” to the Marshalsea “for his evill demeanour to Ruy Gomes of the Kinges Pryvie Chambre.” Acts of the Privy Council of England, Volume 5, 1554–1556, ed. John Roche Dasent (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1892), 65. British History Online, http:// www.british-history.ac.uk/acts-privy-council/vol5/pp51-75. The following year on July 2 the Privy Council commended an alderman of Canterbury for aiding some of Philip’s servants who had been robbed and wounded while they were coming from Dover with

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would be restored to good order,43 the likelihood that that would happen gradually disappeared in their accounts. Further complicating the matter was the presence of the Council itself. From the time of Isabel and Ferdinand, Spanish monarchs ruled with a strong sense of their own authority.44 This was not the Spanish perception of English government under Mary. The Privy Council, composed of forty-three members, had significant oversight of domestic and foreign affairs.45 One Spaniard who accompanied the Iberian retinue to England reported that “the King and Queen have no more authority in this realm than if they were vassals, for the Councillors govern, and are lords of the kingdom and even of the King and Queen.”46 Again, the queen’s authority appeared lacking and, in this instance, affected her husband’s as well, just as his affected hers in Naples. She was, to the disappointment of the Spanish, “not as able” as they were led to suppose and certainly not a “stateswoman.”47 To correct this situation, Philip transacted business with the Council on his own. In doing so, he sought to “acquire

wine for the king. Op. cit., 155. Later in 1555 a Spaniard who was one of the queen’s solicitors was robbed in Fleet Street. Op. cit., 185. Spanish complaints of ill treatment continue in the records of the Privy Council for the next two years. 43 Andres Muñoz, Viaje de Felipe II a Inglaterra (orig. Zaragoza: Esteban de Nagera, 1554), ed. Sociedad de Bibliófilos Españoles, 15 (1877), 64. 44 Agostino Borromeo, “Felipe II y la tradición regalista de la Corona española,” in Felipe II (1527 –1598): Europa y la Monarquía Católica, ed. José Martínez Millán, Volume 3 (Madrid: Parteluz, 1998), 111. 45 David Loades, The Reign of Mary Tudor: Politics, Government and Religion (New York: Routledge, 1991), 23. See also Joanne Paul, Counsel and Command in Early Modern English Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 122–144. 46 An account of what has befallen in the realm of England since Prince Philip landed there, written by a gentleman who accompanied the Prince to England and was present at all the ceremonies, in the shape of a letter to another gentleman, a friend at Salamanca, August 17, 1554. “Spain: August 1554, 16–31,” in CSP, Spain, 13:71–76. British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/cal-state-papers/spain/vol13/pp71-76. When A. F. Pollard critiqued Mary’s government in the early twentieth century, he read Mary’s relationship with her Council quite differently. In spite of attempts to prevent “Philip from converting his titular dignity to anti-national purposes,” he wrote, “no safeguards could control Mary’s affection for her lord, or compel her to follow the wishes of her privy council.” The History of England, 158. 47 Ruy Gómez de Silva to Francisco de Eraso, August 23, 1554. “Spain: August 1554, 16–31,” in CSP, Spain, 13:71–76. British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac. uk/cal-state-papers/spain/vol13/pp71-76.

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authority and use it on occasion.”48 The Council itself assisted him by translating “a note on all suche matters of state” into Latin or Spanish so that he could read it.49 It also ordered “that all matters of Estate passing in the King and Quenes names shuld be signed with both their hands.”50 This practice was strictly adhered to when Philip was in England. He thus acquired authority for himself by learning the English system and participating in the daily affairs of government, something Mary made no attempt to do in Naples or Spain, even when Brancaccio gave her an opportunity to do so. Just before Philip left England in 1555, he created a smaller Select Council.51 It met several times a week. After each meeting it sent a Latin summary of its recommendations to Philip for comment.52 Ever the bureaucratic royal, he frequently responded. In doing so, he undermined Mary’s authority. Though English justice and government may not have met Continental expectations, the Spanish had great hopes for the religious restoration of England to Rome at the beginning of Mary and Philip’s marriage. Initially, the Catholic restoration was a partial success, with help from Cardinal Reginald Pole, Mary’s cousin and the papal legate, Stephen Gardiner, her chancellor, and others. The question then became who should receive credit for the victory. Spanish writers could not agree. Several, including Andres Muñoz, a servant of the Crown, and Pedro Pacheco de Villena, cardinal of Sigüenza (Spain) and viceroy of Naples (1553–1556), gave Mary no credit. Pacheco compared Charles and Philip

48 Simon Renard to the Emperor, September 3, 1554. “Spain: September 1554,”

in CSP, Spain, 13:39–55. British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/calstate-papers/spain/vol13/pp39-55. 49 The use of Latin and especially Castilian Spanish violated the terms of the marriage

agreement, which insisted that no other languages be used. Redworth, “Male and Female Monarchy,” 601. 50 Geoffrey Parker, Imprudent King: A New Life of Philip II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 85. 51 Philip’s creation of the Select Council was in line with his general desire to reorganize his territories into specific conciliar regions. Until 1556 the Council of Aragon oversaw the Habsburgs’ Italian possessions (Naples, Sicily, and Milan), but in that year Philip created the Council of Italy to administer them instead. Manuel Rivero, “The Court of Madrid and the Courts of the Viceroys,” in A Constellation of Courts: The Courts and Households of Habsburg Europe, 1555–1665, eds. René Vermeir, Dries Raeymaekers, and José Eloy Hortal Muñoz (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2014), 62. 52 Parker, Imprudent King, 85.

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to Constantine in their service to the church and made no mention of the queen.53 Muñoz wrote that England, which was lost, had now been found and recovered. He credited Philip and neglected to mention Mary in any substantial role.54 The original title of his book, Sumario y verdadera relación del buen viaje que el invictissimo Príncipe de las Españas don Felipe hizo á Inglaterra, y recebiminto en Vincestre donde caso y salio para Londres, en el cual se contiene grandes y maravillosas cosas que en este tiempo passaron, omitted Mary altogether even though it mentioned that Philip married (caso) and went to London (salio para Londres ). Muñoz even dedicated his book to a woman—Doña Luisa Enríquez de Girón, countess of Benavente and daughter of Don Fernando Enríquez de Velasco, 5th Admiral of Castile—while publishing under the regency of another woman—Doña Juana, Philip’s sister, who governed the Spanish kingdoms in his absence. Yet he failed to mention Philip’s new wife.55 Philip himself, in a long and exasperated letter to his uncle Emperor Ferdinand in November 1556, complained that he had brought England back to the Church but all he had received in return was trouble in the Kingdom of Naples because of Pope Paul IV’s alliance with the French.56 Like Muñoz, he did not mention Mary. Some Spanish authors, however, did credit Mary herself or the couple working together for the restoration of Catholicism. Francisco Garrido de Villena, a caballero of Valencia, wrote that Mary, the “sovereign queen” who was “more than human,” worked “a miracle” in England by restoring the religion that had been “lost to a cursed Lutheran

53 Cardinal Sigüenza to Cardinal Granvelle, December 22, 1554, Cartas a Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle, Obispo de Arrás, Biblioteca del Palacio Real II-2286, ff. 326–329. He wrote, “Yo no se por donde me comencasse encarecer esta Reduction de Inglaterra a la obedencia de la iglesia y creo que su magd. y la magd. del Rey se pueden tener por los mas bien aventurados hombres que ha havido grandes tiempos.” For further praise, see Luis Sarmiento to Francisco de Eraso, February 25, 1555, in Archivo General de Simancas, Legajo E 377, f. 126. 54 Muñoz wrote, “Ya se recoge el ganado / Inglés que andaba perdido / Por el pastor

que allá es ido / Recójase ya Albión / Y conozca el bien que tiene / Pues el tal, que le conviene / Para la fé y salvación / Penitencia y communión / De nuevo ha constituido / Por el pastor que allá es ido.” Viaje de Felipe II a Inglaterra, 82–83. 55 Muñoz, Viaje de Felipe II a Inglaterra, vi. 56 Martín Fernández de Navarete, ed., Colección de documentos inéditos para la Historia

de España, Volume 3 (Madrid: Academia de la Historia, 1843), 431.

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sect.”57 Bartolomé Carranza, the queen’s confessor, referred to Mary and Philip as the “Catholic Kings who restored the ancient and true religion.”58 Previously, the title “Catholic Kings” was associated with Isabel of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon, Mary’s grandparents and Philip’s great-grandparents, who had united the two major kingdoms of Spain through their marriage in 1474 and conquered the Muslim Kingdom of Granada in 1492, thereby concluding the centuries-long Reconquista. Carranza made the connection between Isabel-Ferdinand and Mary-Philip explicit in his preface “to the pious reader” by referring to “the Catholic Kings,” meaning Isabel and Ferdinand, on the first page, then referring to “the Catholic Kings,” meaning Mary and Philip, on the next page, but whereas Isabel and Ferdinand had lived before Martin Luther and thus commanded the Bible to be translated into the vernacular, Mary and Philip removed vernacular Bibles in order to restore Catholicism to England, according to Carranza.59 For Spaniards, the implication of Carranza’s use of the title was that Mary and Philip were supervising a new reconquest, one that was less militarized if no less religiously contentious than the first. Further, his use of the masculine “kings” to refer to both Mary and Philip suggested an equality between them, just as Isabel and Ferdinand had maintained an equilibrium throughout their marriage. Mary, however, only incorporated such 57 Francisco Garrido de Villena, El Verdadero Sucesso de la Famosa batalla de Roncesvalles, con la muerte de los doze pares de Francia, dirigida al Serenissimo, Alto y muy Poderoso señor don Carlos de Austria Infante de las Españas, &c. nuestor Señor (Valencia: Joan de Mey Flandro, 1555), f. 100v. Two stanzas down from this, Garrido plays off the name Mary, intertwining the work of the Virgin Mary and “Maria Ynglesa.” 58 Bartolomé Carranza de Miranda, Comentarios sobre el Catechismo christiano (Antwerp: Martín Nucio, 1558), f. ¶5r. Carranza was in England, but he published in Spanish, meaning that he intended his fellow Spaniards to read his work. 59 Carranza de Miranda, Comentarios, ff. ¶4v-¶5r. English Bibles were not printed during Mary’s reign because Catholic theologians were deeply unsatisfied with the extant translations. However, they were not actively suppressed. Cardinal Pole planned a Catholic translation of the Bible, or at least the New Testament. Other Marian authors included the Psalms and some Gospel passages in English in their popular primers for the laity. William Wizeman, The Theology and Spirituality of Mary Tudor’s Church (New York: Ashgate, 2006), 252–253; Alexandra Walsham, “Unclasping the Book?: Post-Reformation Catholicism and the Vernacular Bible,” Journal of British Studies, 42:2 (2003), 150. Lucy Wooding observes that some Englishmen believed the queen had an interest in biblical scholarship and saw her as a “champion of scripture.” Rethinking Catholicism in Reformation England (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000), 119. Carranza himself included many passages of Scripture in his Comentarios.

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language in formulaic titles on official documents. When she and Philip wrote to the pope in February 1555, they referred to themselves as “Angliae Franciae Neapolis Hierusalem et Hiberniae reges, fidei defensores, principes Hispaniarum et Siciliae” [kings of England, France, Naples, Jerusalem, and Ireland, defenders of the faith, princes of the Spains and of Sicily],60 but by the end of her life, Philip dropped the pretense of joint monarchy. He sent his ambassador, Don Juan de Figueroa, to Paul IV in September 1558, two months before Mary died, and ordered him to give obedience “in my name and in the name of my kingdoms of Spain and other dependents of them…and for the kingdoms of England and Naples, and he carries my power (poder mio) to do it in the order and way that you command.”61 While it is true that Mary was very sick at this point, Philip’s use of the singular pronoun—my kingdoms, my power—rather than the plural “our” erased his wife entirely from her position as queen in any of her realms, even England. Mary’s failure to use the well-known phrase “Catholic kings” in literature for her Spanish subjects allowed them to see her less as a co-equal, vigorous ruler and more as a woman whose sexuality was problematic. Though an early Castilian work compared her to Oriana, the beautiful heiress to the throne of Great Britain in Amadís de Gaula,62 Ruy Gómez de Silva, a close advisor to Philip, observed that she was not particularly given to physical allurements63 and was “rather older than we had been told.”64 Had she dressed in the Spanish style, “she would not look so old

60 José Ignacio Tellechea Idígoras, Felipe II y el Papado: Colección de Breves pontificios

(1550–1572), Volume I (Madrid: Fundación Universitaria Española, 2004), 14. 61 Tellechea Idígoras, Felipe II y el Papado, 29. 62 Samson, “A Fine Romance,” 87. See also Glyn Redworth, “Nuevo mundo u otro

mundo? Conquistadores, cortesanos, libros de caballerías y el reinado de Felipe el Breve de Inglaterra,” in Actas del Primer Congreso Anglo-Hispano, eds. Richard Hitchcock and Ralph Penny, Volume 3 (Madrid: Castalia, 1994), 113–125. Castilian Spanish imprints of Amadís de Gaula used the term “la gran Bretaña” for England/Britain. See, for example, Los quatro libros del invencible Cavallero Amadís de Gaula, Volume 1 (Louvain: Servais van Zassen, 1551), ff. 27–28. 63 Ruy Gómez de Silva to Francisco de Eraso, August 12, 1554. Fernández de Navarete, ed., Colección de documentos inéditos, 3:531. “Sabe muy bien pasar lo que no es bueno en ella para la sensualdiad de la carne.” 64 Ruy Gómez de Silva to Francisco de Eraso, July 27, 1554. “Spain: July 1554, 16– 31,” in CSP, Spain, 12:312–322. British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac. uk/cal-state-papers/spain/vol13/pp312-322.

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and flabby.”65 The queen’s lack of physical attraction led Gómez to write that “it will take a great God to drink this cup,” but Philip knew that he had made the marriage “in order to remedy the disorders of this Kingdom [England] and preserve the Low Countries,” not for fleshly reasons.66 Of course, the new king upheld all the conventions and proprieties of courtly marriage, as befitted a man of his status, but it was clear that the future queen of Spain was less than desirable as a woman to some of her future subjects. Further, her age at marriage, 38, led some to believe that there was little possibility she could conceive and bear a healthy child. Their letters are marked with cynicism and skepticism about her supposed pregnancies. Spanish disdain for the queen’s sexuality extended to English women in general. The Spanish gentleman who complained about the prevalence of theft in England remarked that English women dressed “in a manner which I am unable to approve of, and I do not think any Spaniard would differ from me.” They did “not wear the hoods and veils so common in Spain, but walked about town uncovered and even traveled in the same way, though some of them, when abroad in London, covered their faces with veils like those worn [in Spain] by nuns who wished not to be seen.” They wore “short skirts, and most of them very tight-fitting black stockings and slashed shoes like the men’s.” He also thought that the women who served the queen were “so far from beautiful as to be downright ugly.”67 These criticisms of the physical appearance, manner of dress, fertility, and sensuality of English women generally and of Mary in particular came from elite men. We know little of what Spanish women thought about these things. Those such as Doña Juana who corresponded with Mary and mentioned her to others in writing tended to use formulaic

65 Ruy Gómez de Silva to Francisco de Eraso, July 29, 1554. “Spain: July 1554, 16– 31,” in CSP, Spain, 12:312–322. British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac. uk/cal-state-papers/spain/vol13/pp312-322. The reference came after Doña Juana sent Mary a present of “dresses and coifs.” 66 Ruy Gómez de Silva to Francisco de Eraso, July 29, 1554. “Spain: July 1554, 16– 31,” in CSP, Spain, 12:312–322. British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac. uk/cal-state-papers/spain/vol13/pp312-322. 67 A second letter from a Spanish gentleman who accompanied Philip to England, also addressed to a gentleman of Salamanca, October 2, 1554. “Spain: October 1554, 1–15,” in CSP, Spain, 13:55–71. British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/calstate-papers/spain/vol13/pp55-71.

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phrases of happiness at the news of her marriage and supposed pregnancy, pity for her failed pregnancies, or thoughtfulness and gratitude about gift exchange, particularly gifts of clothing or other textiles. Juana, however, was at a disadvantage compared to the men who actually saw the queen and criticized her because she had no way of visualizing her. Portraits of Mary came late to Spain. Among the Habsburgs and in Spain beauty had its own authority. It was often closely tied to the attributes of power.68 One can see this most obviously in their portraiture. In 1553, during Mary and Philip’s marriage negotiations, Charles V sent one of Titian’s portraits of his son to England so that Mary would have a visual of her future husband.69 For their marriage, the emperor commissioned Antonis Mor to paint the queen. In the portrait, executed in 1554, Mary is nearly expressionless, a difficult subject to read, though her gaze is penetrating. Rather than emphasizing any specific aspect of her personality, Mor conveys her beauty and power through externals—a rose in her right hand, the beautiful brocade of her dress and the red velvet chair on which she sits, the elaborate jewels on her hands, gloves, headpiece, and dress, and even the smooth, unblemished skin on her hands. Karel van Mander, a contemporary artist who wrote a biography of Mor, stated that Mor had “copied the head of this Queen, who was a very beautiful woman.” Cardinal Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle, the bishop of Arras and minister for the Habsburg rulers, “praised the portrait highly, and the beauty of this princess.”70 A copy of Mor’s work was sent to the emperor, who then took it to the monastery of Yuste in Spain when he abdicated in January 1556,71 but that was two years into Mary and Philip’s marriage, and the early reports from Iberian men in England had set the tone for interpreting Mary’s physicality and sexuality and minimizing her authority. When Doña Juana had her own portrait painted 68 Maria Cristina Quintero, Gendering the Crown in the Spanish Baroque (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012), 61. 69 Sending a portrait of a proposed spouse during royal marriage negotiations was common in sixteenth-century Europe. Henry VIII, Mary’s father, had famously sent Hans Holbein the Younger to paint his future fourth wife, Anne of Cleves, and her sister in 1539. When he met Anne at Rochester Abbey the following year, he believed she did not fit the image conveyed in her portrait and shortly thereafter ended the marriage. 70 Joanna Woodall, “An Exemplary Consort: Antonis Mor’s Portrait of Mary Tudor,” Art History, 14:2 (1991), 206. 71 Antonis Mor, Mary Tudor, Queen of England, Second Wife of Philip II (1554), Museo del Prado, Spain.

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by Alonso Sánchez Coello in 1557, she wore a “bust-length miniature” of Philip, her king, around her neck but no miniature of Mary, her queen.72 Sarah Duncan has shown that Mary astutely used her image to convey power through portraiture in England,73 but the dearth of Marian portraits in Iberia and Naples reveals that she failed to do the same in her Mediterranean kingdoms. When Charles V abdicated, he gave Spain to Philip. As queen consort, Mary was now “grafted” onto the “golden age and great felicity” of Spain.74 Spanish queens consort were often formidable women. One thinks of Leonor of Castile (d. 1290), wife of Edward I of England; or María of Castile (d. 1458), wife of Alfonso V of Aragon; or Mary’s mother Catherine of Aragon (d. 1536) and grandmother Isabel of Castile (d. 1504), the latter both a queen regnant and a queen consort, just like Mary. They skillfully served their kingdoms and often controlled or influenced the public discourse on their role. Most Spaniards, however, knew little of Mary as queen in the realm. Instead, they knew Doña Juana. Her court in Valladolid was dominated by powerful and intellectual women, including two dowager queens: Leonor, widow of Francis I of France, and María, widow of Louis II of Hungary. Both women were sisters of Charles V and both died in 1558, the same year as Mary.75 As regent, Juana communicated frequently with the papacy, established new religious institutions, persecuted suspected Protestants, and patronized the arts. Like Mary, she faced several major crises during her regency. Suspected Protestant cells discovered in Valladolid and Sevilla led to two autos de fe and the Inquisition’s publication of the Index of Prohibited Books (1554 in Valladolid, based on the Valencian Index of 1551) in the same year that the English bishops’ courts began proceedings against people for heresy. Revolts in North Africa required her to intervene militarily, while

72 This painting is now in the Museo de Bellas Artes, Bilbao, Spain. P. G. Matthews, “Portraits of Philip II of Spain as King of England,” The Burlington Magazine, 142:1162 (Jan., 2000), 13, 15. Matthews comments on the miniature of Philip but does not mention Mary’s absence. 73 Sarah Duncan, Mary I: Gender, Power, and Ceremony in the Reign of England’s First Queen (New York: Palgrave, 2012), 109–110. 74 Garrido de Villena, El Verdadero Sucesso, f. 17r. Garrido’s work is a panegyric to both Spain and the royal family. 75 Helen Nader, Power and Gender in Renaissance Spain: Eight Women of the Mendoza Family, 1450–1650 (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 155.

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English and Ottoman corsairs in the Atlantic and Mediterranean fought the Marqués de Santa Cruz’s naval squadrons. Money, always in short supply and constantly in flux, frequently caused problems, and in 1557 she had to suspend payment of state debts.76 Her brother constantly begged her to send more money north to support his armies in the Low Countries, but she was not always able to do so.77 Juana’s ability to navigate these crises left no doubt about her authority or her capacity to govern. Her presence and her proven capability implicitly negated Mary’s authority in the kingdom. There was no need for the de jure queen to come when the de facto queen sufficed. In addition to being visually and physically absent from Spain, Mary was inconsistent symbolically. Diogo Homem, a Portuguese cartographer living in England, produced the Queen Mary Atlas sometime between 1555 and 1558. Alexander Samson argues that Mary probably commissioned it for her husband.78 The map has a large armorial device joining the royal coats-of-arms of England and Spain, the latter since defaced, placed over the geographic representation of England. What scholars have failed to notice is that the armorial device on top of Spain contains only the Spanish coat-of-arms.79 The English lions and the French fleurs-delis (representing Calais) are entirely absent. This symbolic absence from a map that Mary likely commissioned is striking and suggests that her role as queen of Spain was either an afterthought for her because of the demands England placed upon her or that she did not perceive a need to establish her authority there in the same way that her husband needed to establish his in England. By contrast, Thomas Geminus, a Flemish engraver, dedicated maps of Britain and Spain to the couple

76 Anne J. Cruz, “Juana of Austria: Patron of the Arts and Regent of Spain, 1554– 1559,” in The Rule of Women in Early Modern Europe, 103–122. See also Jeremy Roe and Jean Andrews, eds., Representing Women’s Political Identity in the Early Modern Iberian World (London: Routledge, 2020), especially Chapters 6 and 7. 77 Kamen, Philip of Spain, 70; Carmen Sanz Ayán, “La regencia de doña Juana de Austria. Su dimension humana, intellectual y política,” in Felipe II: La Monarquía y su época: La Monarquía Hispánica (Madrid: Real Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial, 1998), 139. 78 Samson, Mary and Philip, 12. 79 Diogo Homem, The Queen Mary Atlas (1558), British Library Add MS 5415A,

f. 10r. It has been digitized at http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=add_ms_ 5415_a_f001r.

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in 1555.80 As Samson has observed, the escutcheon on the map of Britain shows the English and Scottish coats-of-arms with a rose between them.81 The map of Iberia joins the Spanish and English coats-of-arms beneath an imperial crown, though Philip was not yet king of Spain when Geminus made the map. Surrounding the armorial device is a wreath with three pomegranates on both the left and right sides.82 The pomegranate had been Catherine of Aragon’s symbol and was one Mary adopted as well. One could argue, then, that Mary did appear symbolically on the Geminus map of Spain, but Samson notes that because the dedication appears on the map of Spain, not Britain, Geminus intended it for Philip, not the queen.83 The reason for including the English arms was to remind the viewer of the extent of Philip’s authority, not necessarily to support Mary’s. The cartographic evidence from her reign thus indicates that Mary had no policy of joint public symbolism throughout her and her husband’s realms. Mary had little control over some things as far as they reflected on her authority as queen among Neapolitans and Spaniards. The English Privy Council was distinct in membership and responsibilities from Spanish royal councils, and Parliament, with its two houses of lords and commons, was quite different in procedure and effectiveness than the Spanish Cortes, with its three houses of prelates, nobles, and urban procurators.84 Spanish criticism in this matter, then, was not necessarily criticism of her. It was criticism of a unique system that she headed and the limitations that system placed on her. Gómez’s assertion that Mary was not a “stateswoman” may have some truth behind it,85 but it is important 80 Alexander Samson, “Mapping the Marriage: Thomas Geminus’s ‘Britanniae Insulae Nova Descripto’ and ‘Nova Descriptio Hispaniae’ (1555),” Renaissance and Reformation, 31:1 (2008), 95. 81 Samson, “Mapping the Marriage,” 100. Thomas Geminus, Britanniae insulae nova descriptio (London: Thomas Geminus, 1555). Now in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. 82 Thomas Geminus, Nova descriptio Hispaniae (London: Thomas Geminus, 1555). Now in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. 83 Samson, “Mapping the Marriage,” 100. 84 For a contemporary Spanish description of Mary’s Parliament and a comparison of

the two, see Florián de Ocampo, Noticias de varios sucesos acaecidos , desde el año de 1521 hasta el 1558, Biblioteca Nacional de España MSS 9937, Volume 2, ff. 135r–153v. 85 Loades writes that she lacked judgment and confidence in conciliar matters. The Reign of Mary Tudor, 38.

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to remember that the Privy Council’s political and administrative functions affected her rule. English society, too, was different from Spanish society. Commentators read this as a reflection on her authority, but that was not necessarily the case. Englishmen and women could “speak [their] mind unashamed” in part because no punitive, quasi-state bureaucracy like the Inquisition existed in England to censor people. Even the English bishops’ courts that began proceedings against heresy late in 1554 never developed into an institution like the Inquisition. Complaints about the pervasiveness of theft and robbery and the excessively harsh and unjust punishments inflicted on thieves and robbers were not new under Mary and cannot be blamed on her authority or lack thereof. English justice in this matter had been the subject of humanist critique for forty years by the time Mary acceded the throne. Thomas More had discussed this specific problem and argued for reform in Book I of Utopia in 1516, the year she was born, but little had changed. Finally, Philip’s decision to rely on his sister Juana, a smart, capable woman, to serve as his regent in Spain while he was away diminished any need for the queen consort to travel south. Had she lived longer, perhaps she would have. As it was, she was the only queen of Spain for two years and Naples for four. Some things, however, she could control but did not. The most obvious of these were her image and the symbolism around her. Like her grandmother before her, she could have used masculine terminology (“Catholic kings”), joint armorial devices, portraiture, and cartography to establish her authority in the Mediterranean. None of this seems to have occurred to her, though, even after Charles commissioned her portrait and she commissioned an atlas marked by armorial devices. Her failure to assert her image and disperse her symbols in the south gave Spanish, Neapolitan, Venetian, and Roman men, among others, the opportunity to characterize her instead. When they did, they used female terminology, arguing that her perceived haggard physical presence and lack of sexual allure compromised her status as queen. Some people saw the queen as a moderating force on Habsburg power in Naples, but her refusal to involve herself in Neapolitan affairs ensured that she was written out of the kingdom’s history. In England some were cautiously optimistic about what she could achieve in reconstituting the Catholic Church. When the Catholic restoration was partially successful, Spanish writers had mixed reactions about who to credit: the queen, the king, or both working together. Here, too, she could have controlled the narrative by sponsoring authors, sending letters to influential people, or issuing public statements

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that subtly emphasized either her accomplishments or those of her and her husband jointly. There was clearly a Spanish market for such works, as Carranza’s, Garrido’s, and Muñoz’s texts show. Her failure to do so again allowed others to write her story. Consequently, after an initial burst of optimism at her accession in 1553, what authority or potential authority she had as queen consort at her marriage in 1554 quickly waned among her Mediterranean subjects. This has had long-lasting consequences for the historiography of her reign, as historians have generally confined themselves to studying her in her English context using the gendered language of early Spanish writers while omitting her entirely from Naples.

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Casa Real-Obras y Bosques. Archivo General de Simancas, Spain, Serie 9, Legajo E 377. Dekker, Thomas, and John Webster. The Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyat with the Coronation of Queen Mary, and the Coming in of King Philip. London: Edward Allde for Thomas Archer, 1607. Fernández de Navarete, Martín, ed. Colección de documentos inéditos para la Historia de España. Volume 3. Madrid: Academia de la Historia, 1843. Foxe, John. Acts and Monumentes of These Latter and Perilous Days. London, 1563. Garrido de Villena, Francisco. El Verdadero Sucesso de la Famosa batalla de Roncesvalles, con la muerte de los doze pares de Francia, dirigida al Serenissimo, Alto y muy Poderoso señor don Carlos de Austria Infante de las Españas, &c. nuestor Señor. Valencia: Joan de Mey Flandro, 1555. Geminus, Thomas. Britanniae Insulae Nova Descriptio. London: Thomas Geminus, 1555. Bibliothèque nationale de France. ———. Nova Descriptio Hispaniae. London: Thomas Geminus, 1555. Bibliothèque nationale de France. Homem, Diogo. The Queen Mary Atlas. 1558. British Library Add MS 5415A. Hughes, Paul L., and James F. Larkin, eds. Tudor Royal Proclamations: Vol. 2 The Later Tudors (1553–1587). New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969. Mor, Antonis. Mary Tudor, Queen of England, Second Wife of Philip II , 1554. Museo del Prado, Spain. Muñoz, Andres. Viaje de Felipe II a Inglaterra. Zaragoza: Esteban de Nagera, 1554. Reprinted Sociedad Bibliófilos Españoles, 15 (1877). Ocampo, Florián de. Noticias de varios sucesos acaecidos, desde el año de 1521 hasta el 1558. Volume 2. Biblioteca Nacional de España, MSS 9937. Papeles varios relativos a las colonias españolas en Italia y América, y otros documentos, 1500–1700. Biblioteca Nacional de España, MSS 8511. Sánchez Coello, Alonso. Doña Juana de Austria. 1557. Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, Spain. Tellechea Idígoras, José Ignacio, ed. Felipe II y el Papado: Colección de Breves pontificios (1550–1572). Volume 1. Madrid: Fundación Universitaria Española, 2004.

Secondary Beem, Charles, and Miles Taylor, eds. The Man Behind the Queen: Male Consorts in History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Belenguer Cebrià, Ernest. Felipe II y el Mediterráneo. Madrid: Sociedad Estatal Conme, 1999.

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Borromeo, Agostino. “Felipe II y la tradición regalista de la Corona Española.” In Felipe II (1527 –1598): Europa y la Monarquía Católica, edited by José Martínez Millán. Volume 3. Madrid: Parteluz, 1998. Brown, Jonathan. Painting in Spain, 1500–1700. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Cruz, Anne J., and Mihoko Suzuki, eds. The Rule of Women in Early Modern Europe. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2009. Dandelet, Thomas James, and John A. Marino, eds. Spain in Italy: Politics, Society, and Religion 1500–1700. Boston: Brill, 2007. Dauverd, Céline. Church and State in Spanish Italy: Rituals and Legitimacy in the Kingdom of Naples. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Doran, Susan, and Thomas Freeman, eds. Mary Tudor: Old and New Perspectives. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Duffy, Eamon, and David Loades, eds. The Church of Mary Tudor. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005. Duncan, Sarah. Mary I: Gender, Power, and Ceremony in the Reign of England’s First Queen. New York: Palgrave, 2012. Edwards, John. Mary I: England’s Catholic Queen. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011. Edwards, John, and Ronald Truman, eds. Reforming Catholicism in the England of Mary Tudor: The Achievement of Friar Bartolomé Carranza. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005. Elton, G. R. Reform and Reformation: England, 1509–1558. London: Edward Arnold, 1977. Fernández Conti, Santiago. Los consejos de estado y Guerra de la Monarquía hispana en tiempos de Felipe II (1548–1598). Valladolid: Junta de Castilla y León, 1998. Guy, John. Tudor England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Kamen, Henry. Philip of Spain. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. Levin, Carole. The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994. Loades, David. Mary Tudor: A Life. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989. ———. The Reign of Mary Tudor: Politics, Government, and Religion in England, 1553–1558. New York: Routledge, 1991. Matthews, P. G. “Portraits of Philip II of Spain as King of England.” The Burlington Magazine 142:1162 (Jan., 2000): 13–19. Nader, Helen. Power and Gender in Renaissance Spain: Eight Women of the Mendoza Family, 1450–1650. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Parker, Geoffrey. The Grand Strategy of Philip II . New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.

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———. Imprudent King: A New Life of Philip II. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014. Paul, Joanne. Counsel and Command in Early Modern English Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pereda, Felipe. Images of Discord: Poetics and Politics of the Sacred Image in Fifteenth-Century Spain. Translated by Consuelo López-Morillas. London: Harvey Miller, 2019. Pérez Martín, María Jesús. María Tudor: La Gran Reina Desconocida. Madrid: Ediciones Rialp, 2018. Pollard, A. F. The History of England from the Accession of Edward VI to the Death of Elizabeth (1547 –1603). London: Longmans Green, 1910. Reprinted New York, 1969. Pollnitz, Aysha. Princely Education in Early Modern Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Prescott, H. F. M. Spanish Tudor: The Life of Bloody Mary. London: Constable, 1940. Quintero, María Cristina. Gendering the Crown in the Spanish Baroque. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012. Read, Conyers. The Tudors: Personalities and Practical Politics in 16th Century England. New York: H. Holt, 1936. Reprinted Freeport Books for Libraries, 1968. Redworth, Glyn. “‘Matters Impertinent to Women’: Male and Female Monarchy under Philip and Mary.” The English Historical Review 112:447 (Jun., 1997): 597–613. ———. “Nuevo mundo u otro mundo? Conquistadores, cortesanos, libros de caballerías y el reinado de Felipe el Breve de Inglaterra.” In Actas del Primer Congreso Anglo-Hispano, edited by Richard Hitchcock and Ralph Penny. Volume 3, 113–125. Madrid: Castalia, 1994. Richards, Judith M. Mary Tudor. New York: Routledge, 2008. ———. “Mary Tudor: Renaissance Queen of England.” In High and Mighty Queens of Early Modern England: Realities and Representations, edited by Carole Levin, Debra Barrett-Graves, and Jo Eldridge Carney, 27–43. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Roe, Jeremy, and Jean Andrews, eds. Representing Women’s Political Identity in the Early Modern Iberian World. London: Routledge, 2020. Rovito, Pier Luigi. Il viceregno spagnolo di Napoli: Ordinamento, Istituzioni, Culture di Governo. Naples: Arte Tipgrafica, 2003. Samson, Alexander. “A Fine Romance: Anglo-Spanish Relations in the Sixteenth Century.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 39:1 (2009): 65–94. ———. “Mapping the Marriage: Thomas Geminus’s ‘Britanniae Insulae Nova Descripto’ and ‘Nova Descriptio Hispaniae’ (1555).” Renaissance and Reformation 31:1 (2008): 95–116.

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———. Mary and Philip: The Marriage of Tudor England and Habsburg Spain. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020. Sanz Ayán, Carmen. “La regencia de doña Juana de Austria. Su dimension humana, intellectual y política.” In Felipe II: La Monarquía y su época: La Monarquía Hispánica. Madrid: Real Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial, 1998. Shaw, Christine. Barons and Castellans: The Military Nobility of Renaissance Italy. Boston: Brill, 2014. Vermeir, René, Dries Raeymaekers, and José Eloy Hortal Muñoz, eds. A Constellation of Courts: The Courts and Households of Habsburg Europe, 1555–1665. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2014. Walsham, Alexandra. “Unclasping the Book?: Post-Reformation Catholicism and the Vernacular Bible.” Journal of British Studies 42:2 (April 2003): 141–166. Whitelock, Anna. Mary Tudor: England’s First Queen. London: Bloomsbury, 2009. Wistreich, Richard. Warrior, Courtier, Singer: Giulio Cesare Brancaccio and the Performance of Identity in the Late Renaissance. New York: Ashgate, 2007. Wizeman, William. The Theology and Spirituality of Mary Tudor’s Church. New York: Ashgate, 2006. Woodall, Joanna. “An Exemplary Consort: Antonis Mor’s Portrait of Mary Tudor.” Art History 14:2 (1991): 192–224. Wooding, Lucy. Rethinking Catholicism in Reformation England. Oxford: Clarendon, 2000.

Speaking from Spain

From Lioness to Exemplary Yet Unsuccessful Queen: Mary I in Early Modern Spain Kelsey J. Ihinger

In the sixteenth century, England passed through a series of religious reforms that would cost hundreds of lives. Looking back on these reforms, one sixteenth-century historian lamented how the English monarchy “burned the whole kingdom and consumed it in living flames, from which until today she suffers and mourns the fire.”1 This “bloody and pitiful tragedy” was followed by the “bloody decrees” of a woman who showed an “insatiable thirst for human blood.”2 In the midst of upheaval, such language may not have seemed overdramatic. To this day, the image of Bloody Mary has persisted, yet the actions described in the quotations 1 “abrasó y consumió con vivas llamas todo el reino de Inglaterra; el cual hasta hoy padece y llora su incendio.” Pedro de Ribadeneyra, Historia ecclesiastica del scisma del Reyno de Inglaterra (Madrid: Pedro de Madrigal, 1588), fol. 3v. All translations in the chapter are my own. I have modernized spelling within Spanish quotations to maintain consistency between modern printed and original sources, but I leave the original spelling and accentuation in titles. 2 “sangrienta y lastimera tragedia”; “sangrientos decretos”; “sed insaciable de sangre humana.” Ribadeneyra, Historia, fol. 365v, fol. 286r, fol. 308r.

K. J. Ihinger (B) University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 V. Schutte and J. S. Hower (eds.), Writing Mary I, Queenship and Power, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95132-0_6

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above cannot be attributed to this Catholic queen whose religious zeal— with the help of her detractors—gained her such an unflattering epithet. Instead, it was England’s King Henry VIII who lit his nation on fire; his “daughter of blood” was not Mary but Elizabeth.3 This was, at least, how the Spanish historian Pedro de Ribadeneyra described England’s religious turmoil when he wrote Historia ecclesiastica del scisma del Reyno de Inglaterra (1587). For Ribadeneyra and for Spain, Mary was not, nor would she come to be, an enemy of the English nation. She represented, on the contrary, hope for that nation’s salvation. Her marriage to the future Philip II in 1554 was meant to solidify England’s reconciliation with the Catholic Church and to tip the balance of power in Europe in Spain’s favor, allowing Charles V to maintain advantage over his French rival across the border in Italy, the Netherlands, and the Alps. For these reasons, Mary’s image in Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries would develop far removed from her bloody English persona. Instead, Spanish writers in this era would present an English queen whose image was positive but far from constant. Tracing Spanish depictions of this queen in the century and a half that followed her reign shows the malleability of Mary I, shaped by Spain’s changing relationship with England and its greater European ambitions as the Spanish Empire evolved. This essay means to chronicle Spanish representations of Mary. It will explore Mary I’s image in Spain at four different stages in her life and legacy: the first, during the year that preceded her reign and up until her marriage with Philip (1553–1554); the second, during the years that separated her marriage and her death (1554–1558); third, during the reign of her half-sister Elizabeth (1558–1603); and finally, through the end of the seventeenth century, when Spain’s position as the dominant power in Europe had waned and the Spanish Empire no longer found itself in a position to restore Catholicism to England. These four periods will depict Mary’s transformation from the ideal ruler of her people, to a powerful though less proactive Catholic symbol, to a waning call to action, and finally a historical figure whose image was influenced primarily by changing Spanish sentiment toward England. Mary’s legacy

3 “hija de sangre.” Ribadeneyra, Historia, fol. 92v.

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has been fodder for significant debate and revision since her reign, a testament to its complexity.4 Yet still, little has been done to consider how Mary was depicted from the perspective of the nation whose prince she married.5 Through an examination of religious and secular histories, news pamphlets, and popular texts (from plays to epic poems), this essay will reveal the multiple Maries that Spaniards came to know during and after her lifetime. It is this author’s hope that an analysis of Spain’s many Maries will not only demonstrate the way that the image of this foreign queen was celebrated, repackaged, and repurposed according to Spain’s contemporary interests but also that these Maries will contribute to our modern reassessment of Mary I’s capabilities and her successes.

A Fighter in Her Own Right: Mary Unwed Spain’s primary interest in Mary prior to her accession stemmed from her status as Henry’s legitimate heir. She was, for a time, betrothed to Charles V, her uncle, and she continued to rely on his support after her mother’s marriage to Henry was annulled. This political relationship did not, however, translate to any significant presence in Spanish print. It was upon Edward’s death, when hope for an alliance between Spain and England was renewed, that Mary would first appear in print in Spain. As José Solís de Santos explains, “it is with the change in situation— the ascension of the unfortunate daughter of Catherine of Aragon, who had never renounced her Catholic faith—that the greatest number of references [to England] in memorandums and pamphlets are produced [in Spain].”6 In three Spanish texts published between 1553 and 1554,

4 For an overview of the revision of Mary Tudor’s reign, see Retha Warnicke, “Mary I, Queen of England: Historiographical Essay, 2006 to Present,” in The Birth of a Queen Essays on the Quincentenary of Mary I , eds. Sarah Duncan and Valerie Schutte (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 255–72; see also the essays included in Mary Tudor: Old and New Perspectives, eds. Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). The reigns of both Mary and Elizabeth are reconsidered in Tudor Queenship: The Reigns of Mary and Elizabeth, eds. Alice Hunt and Anna Whitelock (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 5 Recently published in its fourth edition is the only Spanish-language history written about Mary Tudor: María Jesús Pérez Martín, María Tudor: La gran reina desconocida (Madrid: Rialp, 2018). 6 “Es a raíz del vuelco en la situación que supuso la llegada al trono de la cismática Inglaterra de la desafortunada hija de Catalina de Aragón, que nunca había renunciado

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before Mary wed Philip, Mary emerged in the image of a resilient queen, a just, powerful, effective, and highly capable ruler, whose piety was clear but by no means her only laudable quality.7 Such a depiction of the future Mary I conformed to Spain’s political interest in England, presenting a ruler worthy of the nation’s prince before their betrothal. Mary’s growth into this image of the ideal ruler in Spanish print was gradual but rapid. The first Spanish text that depicted Mary’s tumultuous accession mentioned her struggle briefly amidst news of Edward’s death and other conflicts in Europe. Nuevas de la Guerra, published in 1553, highlighted the evil of the Duke of Northumberland first in poisoning the young king and then in attempting to steal the throne for his daughter-inlaw. Within this pamphlet, Mary had little agency in the fight to claim her rightful place as queen. According to the author, Mary succeeded thanks primarily to God and to the support of “some other principal men of the realm,” one of whom told Mary what she must do to reclaim her throne.8 Yet Mary’s dependence on God’s favor and loyal noblemen changed dramatically in two further documents that depicted this period for Spanish audiences. Antonio de Guaras wrote of the same events that brought Mary to the throne in Carta de nuevas... al Ilustre Señor Duque de Albuquerque, printed in three editions in Antwerp, Medina del Campo, and Alcalá de Henares in early 1554.9 In this letter, Guaras also focused on Northumberland’s evil and yet wrote Mary as having significant agency and intelligence in her response to his schemes. According to Guaras, Mary, “like the intelligent woman she is,” knew of Northumberland’s

a su fe católica, cuando se producen el mayor número de referencias en memorias y relaciones españolas.” José Solís de Santos, “Relaciones de sucesos de Inglaterra en el reinado de Carlos V” in Testigo del tiempo, memoria del universo: cultura escrita y sociedad en el mundo ibérico (siglos XV–XVIII), eds. Manual Fernández, Carlos-Alberto González Sánchez, and Natalia Millard Álvarez (Barcelona: Publicaciones de l’abadia de Montserrat, 2009), 648. 7 Mary appears in one anonymous surviving manuscript from the years prior to her accession. Crónica del rey Enrico Otavo de Inglaterra, ed. Mariano Roca de Togores (Madrid: por Alfonso Durán, 1874), 249. 8 “algunos otros principales del reino.” Nuevas de la guerra. Traslado de una carta que Christoval Vazquez de Avila embio del campo de su Magestad al Ilustrisimo y muy excelente señor duque de Medina Sidonia: en que le da relacion de la victoria que Magestad ha avido contra sus enemigos (1553), Biblioteca Nacional de España, R/29839, n.p. 9 Solís de Santos refers to these three editions, “Relaciones,” 652–53. All editions were published in Spanish.

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plan more than a year before it was put into place.10 In response, Mary moved her household away from London, but she did not show active resistance to Northumberland until she was ready. In Guaras’s text, God’s role in ensuring Mary’s victory was relatively small and almost entirely inactive, though his presence remained palpable. Divine providence was exchanged for queenly agency as Mary’s image moved toward that of powerful queen, fit to rule and serve as a worthy ally to Spain. According to Guaras, though God guided England’s fate, his support was simply not enough for victory. Instead, Mary won her subjects’ support thanks to her patience and resilience, and in the midst of defending her claim to the throne, Mary took action: “to animate her supporters ... the queen ordered that all in her camp take battle formation, and Her Majesty came to the camp.”11 There, she was celebrated with such vigor that she was forced to dismount from a nervous horse, “and on foot, with the noblemen and ladies of her court, she walked through the entire camp, which was more than a mile long, giving thanks and wishing good fortune to her men.”12 Mary thus revealed devotion to her supporters, literally joining them on the ground before battle. This laudable quality demonstrated Mary’s preparedness to rule, and her decisive action, in Guaras’s narration, saved the lives of fifty to sixty thousand men.13 Guaras goes on to depict the strengths Mary would demonstrate as queen, before ending his letter with the recommendation of a marriage alliance with the young Prince Philip. Mary showed decisiveness in quelling resistance to the renewed public mass. Yet she also sought to minimize division, commanding “that all live peacefully” despite religious affiliation.14 Mary in this way demonstrated magnanimity before her subjects, intelligence, and strength in rulership. At the time Guaras 10 “como discreta que es.” Antonio de Guaras, Carta de nuevas de Antonio de Guaras, criado de la Serenísima y Católica Reina de Inglaterra, al Ilustre Señor Duque de Alburquerque..., in Relaciones de los reinados de Carlos V y Felipe II , vol. 2, ed. Amalio Huarte (Madrid: Sociedad de Bibliófilos Españoles, 1950), 231. 11 “por animar a su gente... mandó Su Alteza que todo su campo se pusiese en orden de batalla, y vino Su Alteza al campo.” Guaras, Carta, 234. 12 “y a pie, con los grandes de su corte y sus damas, paseó todo el campo, que duraba obra de una milla, dándoles gracias de su buena voluntad.” Guaras, Carta, 234. 13 See Guaras, Carta, 236. 14 “manda la reina que todos vivan con quietud....” Guaras, Carta, 248.

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wrote, it was particularly poignant to suggest such strength and potential for England’s future due to his recommendation for Philip’s match with Mary. Despite Philip’s betrothal to the Portuguese Princess Maria, Guaras’s Mary became an argument for shifting Spain’s matrimonial priorities. Philip and Mary’s betrothal, in Guaras’s estimation, would prove beneficial for Spain in its fight against France, while at the same time ensuring England’s Catholic reconciliation. The last Spanish text written prior to Mary’s marriage to Philip, though composed and printed after their betrothal had been determined, followed Guaras in its positive depiction of the English queen and presented an astonishingly forceful depiction of Mary as an independent ruler, full of vigor and justice—all qualities necessary for a successful monarch. In the anonymously authored Relación de las Rebeliones de Inglaterra (1554), God’s role diminished even further to an entirely supportive one. At no moment did God intercede in Mary’s favor, though of course he guided her intensions.15 This pamphlet thus completed Mary’s transformation into a ruler who demonstrated full agency and adeptness in rulership just before Spain’s alliance with England was solidified. In this pamphlet, Mary’s active role in quelling the rebellions began immediately after a plot to kill Philip upon his arrival in England was discovered. Thomas Wyatt, being the only plotter to escape Mary’s arrest, quickly became the man against whom her ingenuity would have to prevail. Mary’s capabilities were put on display when she fought against his troops that marched on London. The author explained that in this moment, Mary removed her troops and allies from court, bringing them to defend their position at the wing of the city. This action, the author noted, was one never taken before by any previous king or queen, and “it is believed that, without having done this, Thomas Wyatt would have entered the city as soon as he arrived.”16 Instead, Wyatt was forced ten miles downriver. In this narration, when Mary faced the man considered “the best soldier there was in all the kingdom,” she did not merely 15 God plays a role in the discovery of the plot to kill Philip. After her speech to the troops, God’s will moves Mary’s public, but her subjects’ change of heart was in addition the direct results of Mary’s words. See Relación de las Rebeliones, in Solís de Santos, “Relaciones,” 677, 679–80. 16 “Créese que, a no haber hecho esto se entrara en la ciudad Thomas Huet [Wyatt] como allí llegara.” Relación de las Rebeliones, qtd. in Solís de Santos, 679.

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encourage her men by walking among them—as she had done in Guaras’s text—but decided to fight alongside them in battle.17 It was only due to her counselors’ insistence that she did not join the fight. As this author proclaimed, “she was made a lioness and showed more spirit than the most valiant man on earth could have shown; and I believe that, had she gone out [to battle], she would have shown the same in her actions.”18 Mary’s tactics and show of strength were enough to win Wyatt’s surrender. Her victory came at the cost of a couple hundred of Wyatt’s men and only three of her own. In what followed of this narration, Mary continued to demonstrate her agency as queen, presenting her reasons for marrying Philip. Mary’s defense of her throne and her marriage were furthermore presented in the light of justice. Because her past mercifulness toward these rebels led to war, Mary’s punishment of them now is just, as the final verses of this pamphlet celebrated: One cannot call war that which war exiles. The overabundance of mercy is harmful to bad men; justice distributed fairly is beneficial to all. Justice that encloses peace, in fact, exiles war. The father tends to punish his beloved son and the surgeon cuts out diseased flesh.19

17 “el mejor soldado que había en el reino.” Relación de las Rebeliones, qtd. in Solís de Santos, 679. 18 “porque estaba hecha una leona y mostraba el mayor ánimo que el más valiente hombre del mundo pudiera mostrar, que creo que, si saliera, lo mismo mostrara en obras.” Relación de las Rebeliones, qtd. in Solís de Santos, 679. 19 “No se puede llamar guerra / la que la guerra destierra / La sobrada piedad / a los malos es dañosa; / justicia con igualdad / a todos es provechosa; / justicia en paz encierra, / pues que la guerra destierra. / Suele el padre castigar / a su hijo muy amado / y el cirujano cortar / las carnes del fistolado.” Relación de las Rebeliones, qtd. in Solís de Santos, 681.

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Mary’s depiction as the father of her nation was significant. As Sarah Duncan has shown, prior to Mary’s reign, justice existed under the purview of the king, while the queen executed the role of merciful intercessor.20 Here, Mary demonstrated a proper balance of the two. In Relación de las Rebeliones, we see the culmination of Mary’s strength as queen on the eve of her wedding to Philip. She was depicted with full agency and the qualities necessary for a capable ruler, showing great promise for England’s future after their alliance with Spain had been finalized.

From Warrior to Saint: Mary’s Transformation After Marriage With the arrival of Philip in England, Mary’s image in Spain began to shift. Several texts were published that chronicled Philip’s journey and later England’s official absolution and reconciliation with the Catholic Church. Written by secular and religious authors alike, they transformed Mary from vigilant fighter and skilled ruler into the object of chivalric benevolence and the means through which England’s Catholic future would be achieved. When Philip traveled to England to wed Mary in 1554, a detailed account of the journey and marriage ceremony was written by Andrés Muñoz. Sumaria y verdadera relacion del buen viaje que el invictissimo Principe de las Españas don Felipe hizo a Inglaterra recounted Philip’s departure from Madrid to his first encounter with Mary and their wedding feast. This account has received critical attention by scholars such as Glyn Redworth and Alexander Samson, who have pointed to the tropes it appropriates from the popular tradition of chivalric romance. As early as 1971, Santiago Nadal had recognized the connection between Spain’s favorite chivalric hero, Amadís de Gaula, and Philip on his journey to

20 Sarah Duncan, “‘Most Godly Heart Fraight with All Mercie’: Queens’ Mercy During the Reigns of Mary I and Elizabeth I,” in Queens and Power in Medieval and Early Modern England, eds. Carole Levin and Robert Bucholz (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 31–32.

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England.21 Redworth memorably stated in his study of Muñoz’s text, “the travels of a young prince to marry a virgin queen on a faraway island could not but encourage a comparison with [chivalric] novels of the period, especially when the defense of the true faith was involved.”22 Within Muñoz’s text, the moments in which chivalric parallels are most notably present are in the devotion of Philip’s noblemen to their prince and in the first meeting between Philip and Mary.23 Notably, in texts written after Philip and Mary’s wedding, Mary became the object of Philip’s quest. She was no longer the driving force behind her own story. Compared to previous Spanish depictions of the English queen, Muñoz demonstrated a relative lack of interest in Mary’s political skill and aptitude for leadership, eliminating any recognition of her agency as ruler. This shift should perhaps be unsurprising given the treatise’s title— Muñoz’s focus was on the journey of Spain’s future king to a new realm. Muñoz noted, however, Mary’s religious devotion during the marriage ceremonies, when he described Mary as having “her eyes always on the devout cross that was on the altar.”24 After recounting their wedding, Muñoz also acknowledged Mary’s dedication to her husband in the care she took in setting up his household. In the remainder of the treatise, Philip’s bride was entirely forgotten but for its closing verses. These referred to the value of the match as it related primarily to England’s future. In uniting Philip and Mary, God brought good fortune to England. Within these poems, Philip and Mary were lauded twice as

21 See Santiago Nadal, Las cuatro mujeres de Felipe II (Barcelona: Editorial Juventud, 1971), 86–87; for Samson’s commentary on the subject, see Alexander Samson, “A Fine Romance: Anglo-Spanish Relations in the Sixteenth Century,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31.9 (Winter 2009): 65–94. 22 “El viaje de un joven príncipe para unirse a una reina virgen en una isla lejana no podía dejar de alentar una comparación con las novelas de la época, especialmente cuando la defensa de la auténtica religión andaba por medio.” Glynn Redworth, “¿Nuevo mundo u otro mundo? Conquistadores cortesanos, libros de caballerías” Actas del I Congreso Anglo-Hispano 3 (1994): 117. 23 In addition to these moments, Redworth notes further aspects of Muñoz’s text that connect Philip’s journey to chivalric tales. See Redworth, “¿Nuevo mundo?,” 117. 24 “la bienaventurada reina siempre tuvo los ojos en un devoto crucifijo que estaba en el altar.” Andrés Muñoz, Sumaria y verdadera relacion del buen viaje que el invictissimo Principe de las Españas don Felipe hizo a Inglaterra (Zaragoza: en casa de Esteban de Nagera, 1554), Biblioteca Nacional de España, Mss. R/1751, n.p.

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defenders of “our faith,” while Philip alone was celebrated as the shepherd of English Catholics and fighter against the “great obstinate wolf” whom he would expel.25 Together these verses continued the trend seen throughout Munoz’s text: they undercut or ignored Mary’s agency in securing England’s Catholic future, instead placing Philip at the center of its religious reconciliation. After the wedding, printed news in Spain that related information about Mary’s reign focused on England’s return to Catholicism. Pamphlets were printed in Spain detailing both the reconciliation as it took place and celebrations that occurred in Toledo following England’s absolution. In these pamphlets, Mary’s role was again not what it was before her marriage, having moved away from her depiction as model ruler. While she was present for all negotiations and addressed the Parliament directly in the pamphlet titled La felicissima y muy alegre nueva de la reducion del Reyno de Inglaterra ala catholica union, y obediencia de la Sede Apostolica (1555), Philip and Cardinal Pole took on principal roles in securing England’s return to Catholicism. In a symbolic gesture noted twice by the pamphlet’s author, Mary took her place between Philip and Pole as they worked together to guide England back to the Catholic Church. Mary was no longer the agent of change in England, yet at the end of this text we see a glimpse of Mary in perhaps her most shining light. When Cardinal Pole arrived in England, Mary believed herself to be pregnant, and after England’s official absolution, the author of this pamphlet wrote: “And who considers the happiness and peace of the queen? She that has shown herself a great servant of God, and as such deserves that in ours and in the coming century she is taken and named for a saint; in this way we will see properly satisfied the obligation that she knew she had to His Divine Majesty, having first offered and then delivered her kingdom to God.”26 In this moment, Mary became a saint in the eyes of Spain and the successful conclusion of Philip’s mission in traveling to England was all but accomplished. Mary’s saintly title 25 “gran lobo pertinaz.” Muñoz, Viaje, n.p. 26 “¿Y quién considera la alegría y la paz de la reina? La cual así por mostrarse gran

sierva de Dios, como es ella, merece que del nuestro, y del siglo venidero sea habida y nombrada por santa, así dignamente se ve haber satisfecho a la obligación que ella conocía tener a la divina majestad, habiendo primeramente ofrecido y después entregado a Dios su reino” (emphasis added). La felicissima y muy alegre nueua de la reducion del Reyno de Inglaterra ala catholica union, y obediencia de la Sede Apostolica (Seville: Juan de Barrera, 1555), Biblioteca da Ajuda, 55-IV-18/2, n.p.

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was undoubtedly given with the highest estimation from Spain, but it also cemented Mary’s transition from skillful ruler to religious object of reverence. Mary’s transformation from capable ruler to religious symbol in Spanish texts published after her marriage was not, however, entirely complete. In December 1555, Juan de Angulo published a short narration describing the masques and public ceremonies that took place in Toledo to celebrate England’s return to Catholicism and Philip’s triumph as King of England. This text, which spanned just over thirty pages in quarto, was printed in Toledo and included both prose and verse descriptions of the events it depicted. In the laudatory poems that open this text, Philip was credited with bringing glory to Spain, yet Mary was also praised for her strength, justice, and leadership, much as she had been before the marriage. In the “Loa del auctor a la serenísima reina María” (and the verses that immediately preceded it), Angulo described Mary’s “manly daring / and high breeding” when confronting rebellions.27 She was compared to Judith in her defense of Catholics, cutting the heads off those who threatened true believers in her realm. Angulo explained in magnificent hyperbole, that Mary was in fact fifty times more impressive than Judith since she cut off fifty heads to Judith’s one.28 Though God gave her the wisdom to reign well, Angulo restored Mary’s agency, giving credit to her active role as ruler and defender of the faith in England. Philip, then, was Mary’s partner in bringing this change to England but not the sole driving force behind it. After Mary’s transformation into the object of Spain’s religious praise, in Angulo’s text there remained a hint of the ruler that had once characterized Mary’s image in Spain. By depicting her as Judith, Angulo effectively combined the religious figure with the brave leader of her nation. His text demonstrates that while Mary reigned with Philip, despite the shift in her image, an appreciation for her ability to rule endured. Perhaps this image of the warrior queen existed as a remnant of Mary’s earlier appearances in Spanish print; it may also demonstrate a continued desire to show the strength of Spain’s ally not only in faith but in war. Unfortunately, not three years later, death would 27 “varonil osadía / y alta rama.” Juan de Angulo, Flor de las solennes alegrias y fiestas que se hizieron en la Imperial ciudad de Toledo por la conversion del Reyno de Inglaterra (Toledo: en casa de Juan de Ferrer, 1555), Biblioteca Nacional de España, R/10569, fol. 4r. 28 See Angulo, Flor, fol. 4r.

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prevent Mary from continuing her fight for Catholicism in England. It would not, however, prevent Spain from returning to her image as the symbol of England’s Catholic potential.

“An Exemplary but Unsuccessful Life”: Mary in Spain at the End of Philip II’s Reign Immediately following Mary’s death, Spanish interest in the English queen quickly diminished, as is evidenced by the fact that no surviving public account of her death remains.29 Philip’s political ambitions and military distractions in Europe meant that he refused to take direct action against Elizabeth for nearly thirty years after her accession. During this time, Spanish print remained relatively silent on the subject of Philip’s late wife as their religious reforms were rescinded and Protestantism returned to England. Yet, at times when Mary’s legacy regained relevance, she would reappear for Spanish audiences. This occurred primarily surrounding the launch of the Armada in 1588 and throughout the 1590s, as war between Spain and England continued. At this time, Mary reappeared in texts primarily authored by Jesuit polemicists who wished to encourage Spanish intervention in England and remembered Mary for her piety, maintaining little of her combative strength. Mary first returned in Ribadeneyra’s Historia ecclesiastica, printed while Philip’s preparations for the Armada were underway. This history chronicled England’s religious reformation for the first time in Spanish. Though Ribadeneyra claimed to write a translation of Nicholas Sander’s De Schismate Anglicano, he expanded upon the role Mary played in this history. As Freddy Domínguez explains, “Ribadeneyra followed Sander’s saintly description, but Mary transcended any simple notion of feminine piety.... She was intelligent, resolute, and prudent, a model of temperance, piety, strength, and constancy.”30 In these qualities, we see something of 29 Though it is likely that there were ceremonies held in Spain after Mary’s death, no public record of them seems to have survived. One Latin record, likely printed in Germany, of the ceremonies held in Brussels on the deaths of Mary and Charles V survives. De exequiis Reginae Mariae Angliae, et Carli Quinti Imperatoris Maximi, Brussalae celebratis (Dilligen: printed by Sebaldus Mayer, n.d.), British Library, https://www.bl.uk/tre asures/festivalbooks/BookDetails.aspx?strFest=0125. Thank you to Alexander Samson for pointing me to this source. 30 Freddy Cristóbal Domínguez, Radicals in Exile: English Catholic Books During the Reign of Philip II (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020), 79.

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the Mary Spaniards became familiar with in texts published during her reign and journey to the throne. Significantly, for those of us studying Mary’s legacy today, Ribadeneyra described the English queen as an “enemy of bloodshed.”31 She showed clemency in pardoning those who offended her. At the same time, as a good Catholic ruler should, she was “very severe and rigorous in punishing those injuries made against God.”32 Here, severity was not related to the defense of a crown that was rightfully hers, as it had been in 1553–1554; rather, her strength came in defending the Catholic faith. This, of course, was the strength Philip was meant to demonstrate in 1588 when sending the Armada to England and renewing the fight for England’s soul (as Ribadeneyra would have seen it). Mary’s strength as a ruler was mitigated, however, in some instances within Ribadeneyra’s text, in which she showed less independent agency. Instead, her authority was forfeited to God and her future husband, much like the texts published after her marriage to Philip. When Northumberland proclaimed Jane Grey queen in 1553, for example, readers of this text not learn of Mary’s wit in dealing with the traitorous counselor. In Ribadeneyra’s account, Mary did not precipitate his attack on her claim by removing herself from London; rather, she found herself “alone and deprived” upon her brother’s death.33 It was thanks to God, who “always favors justice and innocence,” that Mary won her crown.34 Mary was no longer the arbiter of justice but the recipient of it. Thanks to God, thirty-thousand Englishmen rallied behind Mary, transferring their support from Northumberland to the future queen.35 In his narration of the Wyatt rebellion, Ribadeneyra mentioned no military action taken by the queen. Instead, Mary “beat and subjugated [Wyatt], not with weapons, nor with legions of soldiers, but instead with her authority and confidence in God.”36 Heaven had given Mary her victory, but in order

31 “enemiga de derramar sangre.” Ribadeneyra, Historia, fol. 215r. 32 “muy severa y rigurosa en castigar las injurias que se hacían contra Dios.”

Ribadeneyra, Historia, fol. 240v. 33 “sola y desproveída.” Ribadeneyra, Historia, fol. 203v. 34 “siempre favorece la justicia e inocencia.” Ribadeneyra, Historia, fol. 203v. 35 See Ribadeneyra, Historia, fol. 204r. 36 “le venció y sujetó, no con armas, ni con ejércitos de soldados, sino con su autoridad y confianza en Dios.” Ribadeneyra, Historia, fol. 215r.

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to maintain her position, she would require further support. It was for this reason, according to Ribadeneyra, that Mary sought her union with Philip. She was in need of his strength and with him she would share the glory of bringing England back to the true faith.37 Ribadeneyra’s text unsurprisingly emphasized Philip’s role in England’s return to Catholicism, minimizing Mary’s influence, but further texts meant to encourage Spanish intervention in England would turn to other motivational figures entirely. Texts written during Spain and England’s naval conflict of the late sixteenth century often focused on Catholic martyrs, whose deaths were meant to instill animosity toward Elizabeth’s Protestant regime. Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, was one martyr behind whom Catholics throughout Europe would rally. Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas wrote an entire history dedicated to her life. In Herrera’s text, Mary I was mentioned only in passing as a reminder of England’s Catholic past and a catalyst for Elizabeth’s fears when facing the threat that Mary Stuart posed to her reign. In brief moments of Herrera’s text, then, we see that for a Spanish audience Mary I still retained some power as a Catholic symbol. After Ribadeneyra’s and Herrera’s histories, other Spanish texts made inconsistent reference to Mary as they promoted Spanish intervention in England. In Robert Persons’s Relación de algunos martirios que de nuevo han hecho los herejes en Inglaterra (1590) and Joseph Creswell’s Historia de la vida y martyrio que padecio... el P. Henrique Valpolo (1596), for example, English martyrs, from Walpole to those killed in England following the Armada attack, served as motivation for intervention rather than Mary. She was also overlooked in Ribadeneyra’s Tratado de la tribulación (1589), a text meant to reaffirm Spanish will in continuing the fight against heresy in England after the defeat of the Armada. Other religious texts mentioned Mary in passing, in conjunction with Philip. In Relacion de un sacerdote Ingles (1592), translated by Creswell from Persons’s English original (though published anonymously), Mary’s reign was described with nostalgia. The text demonstrated a longing for the days when “England gave no other kingdom the advantage in having 37 Such a shared victory for Catholicism is demonstrated in the introductory letters of Ribadeneyra’s history: “con el resplandor de su vida santísima, y el celo de la gloria de Dios, y consejo y poder del católico rey don Felipe, su marido, fueron desterrados de las tinieblas de las herejías y volvió el sol de la religión [a Inglaterra]” (“with the resplendence of her most saintly life and with her zeal for the glory of God and the council and power of the Catholic king don Philip, her husband, the darkness of heresy was expelled and the sun of religion returned [to England]”). Ribadeneyra, Historia, n.p.

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kings and princes who were Christian, religious, and even saints; and there are even many living today who witnessed this, in the time when our good Queen Mary lived and ruled.”38 At the close of Philip’s reign, Diego de Yepes explained in Historia particular de la persecución de Inglaterra (1599) that without Mary and Philip’s rule, Catholicism would have completely disappeared from England; if she had lived longer, heresy would have ceased to exist there.39 Spain’s depiction of Mary in the final decade of Philip’s reign, when writers wished to influence intervention on behalf of English Catholicism, can perhaps best be summed up in the words of the Basque chronicler Esteban de Garibay y Zarolla. He, too, mentioned Mary in passing in his Illustraciones geneologicas de los catholicos reyes de las Españas (1596), a secular text meant to celebrate the Habsburg line as well as promote Philip II’s daughter’s claim to the French throne. Garibay described Mary as “the catholic and most religious queen” who had lived an “exemplary yet unsuccessful life.”40 Three decades after reaching her full potential in Spanish texts—saintly queen, pregnant with a Catholic heir, defending her throne with the strength of a lioness—Mary had become the symbol of England’s failed Catholic past, only minimally useful in the fight for its Catholic future.

Dwindling Impact: Mary in Seventeenth Century Spain With the passing of Philip II and Elizabeth I, Mary’s once powerful image continued to fade. Throughout the seventeenth century, she was depicted in a handful of documents written when Spain and England’s foreign policies again overlapped. During the reign of Philip III (r. 1598–1621), in the years following the peace treaty signed with James I, two secular

38 “no daba Inglaterra ventaja a ningún reino del mundo en tener reyes y príncipes cristianos, religiosos, y aun Santos; y bien lo vieron muchos de los que hoy viven, en aquel poco tiempo que a nuestra buena reina María le duró la vida y el reino.” Relacion de un sacerdote Ingles (Madrid: por Pedro Madrigal, 1592), fol. 18v. 39 Diego de Yepes, Historia particular de la persecución de Inglaterra Madrid 1599, ed. D.M. Rogers (Western Germany: Greg International Publishers Limited, 1971), 4, 30. 40 “la católica y religiosísima reina”; “ejemplar vida, no bien lograda.” Esteban de Garibay y Zarolla, Illustraciones geneologicas de los catholicos reyes de las Españas (Madrid: por Luis Sánchez, 1596), 21.

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Spanish historians recalled the marriage of Philip and Mary. Following these, in the 1620s, when Spain and England contemplated a marriage alliance and returned to war, Mary reappeared before Spanish audiences in more popular genres. By the time English Catholicism was dealt its final blows in the second half of the century, Spain would neither intervene nor would Mary reappear in print to encourage Spaniards to fight. Following Philip II’s death, the first Spanish text in which Mary I appeared was the second edition of Herrera’s Historia general del mundo (1606). In this edition, Herrera added two chapters that included Mary’s reign and marriage to Philip II. In 1619, Luis Cabrera de Córdoba also recalled England’s Catholic queen in Felipe Segundo, rey de España. Mary played a very small role within the hundreds of pages of history that Herrera and Cabrera wrote, but within these texts we find elements of the multiple Maries that Spaniards had previously come to know. These histories shared glimpses of Mary’s agency and ability to rule, and they also presented Philip’s active role in defending English Catholicism at Mary’s side, when she could not do so alone. Herrera and Cabrera’s emphasis on Philip’s positive influence in England complies with our expectations for an early modern history written about the nation’s recent past. As historians, Herrera and Cabrera would have written what Richard Kagan has called “patriotic history,” celebrating the crown’s achievements.41 Religious reforms in both histories were depicted as the work of Mary and Philip. Herrera repeated on five separate occasions that reforms were the work of “el rey y la reina” (“the king and the queen”).42 For Cabrera, though Philip was the “instrument” of change, it was Mary who insisted on working with Parliament in order to ensure the lasting effects of their efforts.43 Ultimately, these seventeenth-century Spanish historians portrayed Mary and

41 Richard Kagan, Clio and the Crown: The Politics of History in Medieval and Early

Modern Spain (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univerity Press, 2009), 107. 42 See Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas, Primera parte de la historia general del mundo (Valladolid: por Juan Godinez Millis, 1606), 6, 38. 43 Luis Cabrera de Córdoba, Felipe Segundo, rey de España (Madrid: Imprenta, Estereotipia, y Galvanoplastia de Aribau y Compañía, 1876), 3, 30. For Mary’s desire for lasting change see Cabrera, Felipe Segundo, 28.

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Philip’s power sharing relationship that twentieth-century scholars would come to assert.44 Mary’s agency and political skill appeared somewhat differently in these two histories, but they could be seen in both. Though the lioness did not reappear in Herrera’s history, glimpses of her strength remained. In quelling the Wyatt rebellion, for example, Mary gave a speech that persuaded her people to remain faithful as the rebels marched on London, and she took to the battlefield “with great energy, even though they advised her to remain in the Tower of London.”45 Mary’s leadership was, however, tempered by Herrera in his description of her need of Philip at their marriage and when confronting later rebellions. In choosing to marry Mary, Philip agreed to the match, according to Herrera, because “it was in their [Spain’s] best interest to suppress with a strong and powerful hand” England’s religious division.46 Cabrera’s take on the marriage was similar. But in this case, Cardinal Pole convinced Mary to wed Philip because his strength would help to “completely tame the people.”47 For both authors, Mary took no direct action in choosing her husband. Cabrera’s recognition of Mary’s skill in leadership did not come until the moment of her death. In fact, Cabrera presented a much more complex situation for Mary in England than Spanish audiences would have previously been familiar with. For Cabrera, Spain did not approve of the queen’s marriage to Philip, and England struggled to accept Mary’s rule because she was a woman. Philip lent his strength to Mary when, according to Cabrera, he discovered the plots against her

44 Samson discusses Philip and Mary’s power sharing in “Changing Places: The

Marriage and Royal Entry of Philip, Prince of Austria, and Mary Tudor, July–August 1554,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 36.3 (2005): 761–84 and in Mary and Philip: The Marriage of Tudor England and Habsburg Spain (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2020). Many other Hispanists and historians of Mary’s reign have discussed Philip and Mary’s shared governance in England; see Sarah Duncan, Mary I: Gender, Power, and Ceremony in the Reign of England’s First Queen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Glynn Redworth, “‘Matters Impertinent to Women’: Male and Female Monarchy Under Philip and Mary,” The English Historical Review 112.447 (June 1997): 597–613. 45 “con gran ánimo, aunque la aconsejaban que se recogiese en el castillo de Londres.” Herrera, Primera parte, 3. 46 “convenía reprimir con mano fuerte y poderosa.” Herrera, Primera parte, 2. 47 “domar el pueblo enteramente.” Cabrera, Felipe Segundo, 17.

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life in 1557 and executed those responsible.48 In the earlier Wyatt rebellion, Cabrera provided similar details to Herrera regarding the rebellion’s primary actors and location but excluded any reference to Mary’s active intervention. Instead, he simply recognized that rebels sought to prevent the marriage, but they did not succeed.49 Cabrera’s recognition of Mary’s virtues existed only in her eulogy: she died on the nineteenth of November, at forty-tree years and nine months of her exemplary and religious life. . .. She was clement, humane, and easy to pardon, [yet] severe in punishing powerful and tyrannous sectarians; [she was] constant in her labors, of which she suffered many in order to conserve the Catholic faith; [she was] happy in this, and in triumphing over her enemies, most unhappy in being the daughter of such a father [and in] not having children that would succeed her.50

This depiction of Mary contradicted some of Cabrera’s earlier descriptions, yet upon her death Spaniards reading this history again saw glimpses of the queen first described in Spanish print during her brief reign. Despite Philip and Mary’s ultimate failure, we have seen that in writing their histories both Herrera and Cabrera lauded the achievements of this Catholic pair. These Spanish historians continued to present Mary in a positive, albeit somewhat less active, light. When it seemed that the Spanish and English crowns might again be united through marriage in 1623, Mary began to appear in more popular genres. During Prince Charles’s visit to Madrid, a number of pamphlets were published depicting the ceremonies and celebrations organized in his honor. Authors described processions and their participants, the clothing they wore, the livery of their horses, and the gifts that were exchanged.

48 See Cabrera, Felipe Segundo, 18–19 for Spain’s reaction to the marriage and England’s response to Mary’s reign; see 51 for Philip’s role in defending Mary. 49 See Cabrera, Felipe Segundo, 20. 50 “falleció a diecinueve de Noviembre, a los cuarenta y tres años y nueve meses de su

ejemplar y religiosa vida.... La Reina, [tenía] la voz gruesa más que de mujer, el ingenio despierto, el ánimo resoluto y esforzado, el consejo acertado y cuerdo con grandes y excelentes virtudes, como hija imitadora de su madre.... Fue clemente, humana, fácil en perdonar, severa en castigar los poderosos y tiranos sectarios, constante en los trabajos, que padeció innumerables por conservar la religión católica, feliz en esto y en triunfar de sus enemigos, infelicísima en ser hija de tal padre; no tener hijos que la sucediesen.” Cabrera, Felipe Segundo, 245–46.

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In some instances, these printed pamphlets also reproduced letters that discussed negotiations pertinent to the match. One recalled Mary’s reign, nodding again to the potential for England’s future within the nation’s Catholic past. Memorial, en el qual suplican los católicos de Inglaterra al Serenissimo Principe de Gales,... que su Alteza se sirva de dallos una Universidad en cada Reyno de los suyos reproduced a letter written by English Catholics, who requested that Charles build a Catholic university in each of his three kingdoms—Ireland, England, and Scotland. In response to those who suggested that these universities would incite unrest, the author proclaimed, I don’t believe that the heretics will rebel because these kingdoms easily embrace change, as our experience testifies; Henry VIII succeeded in making heretics of Catholics, and his daughter, Mary, despite being a lonely, disinherited, and nearly imprisoned woman, managed to make Catholics out of heretics once more; and her successor, Elizabeth, made heretics of Catholics. And this in such short time, and without rebellion of any import.51

In this letter, Mary was not described in the most flattering light. To a Spanish audience, however, and for this collective English Catholic writer, Mary’s reign still provided hope for England’s future. Shortly after Charles’s visit to Madrid, marriage negotiations failed, and Spain and England returned to war. During this conflict, which lasted from 1625 to 1630, Mary was mentioned in Lope de Vega’s epic poem, La corona trágica (1627), based on the life of Mary Stuart. According to Lope, Mary and Philip shared credit in returning England to the Catholic Church, but Mary also served as powerful incentive for Elizabeth to execute the second Mary that threatened her safety. Her role in this text about Mary Stuart was thus similar to that which she played 51 “que no juzgo que los Herejes se rebelarán, porque esos Reinos abrazan fácilmente novedades, como la experiencia testifica, pues Henrique VIII pudo hacerlos de Católicos Herejes, y su hija doña María con ser mujer sola, desheredada y casi encarcelada, hacerlos otra vez de Herejes Católicos, y su sucesor Isabela, de Católicos Herejes, y todo eso en poco tiempo, y sin rebelión de importancia.” Memorial, en el qual suplican los catolicos de Inglaterra al Serenissimo Principe de Gales, como por merced y don gratuito, despues de concluidos los casamientos, que su Alteza se sirva de dallos una Universidad en cada Reyno de los suyos... (Seville: Matías Clavijo, 1623), Católogo y Biblioteca Digital de Relaciones de Sucesos (siglos XVI–XVII): Biblioteca Colombina y Capitular de Sevilla, 33-4-27-017, fol. 1r.

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in Herrera’s history about this Scottish queen. Following Mary Stuart’s execution, Mary I became a reminder of England’s Catholic potential, but she would not be the primary motivator with which to encourage Spanish animosity toward England, surpassed by martyrs, like the Queen of Scots, whose deaths more effectively served this purpose. In theater, Mary I also failed to solicit the interest that Mary Stuart would. The younger Catholic Mary appeared in at least four plays in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries while Mary I appeared in only one. Pedro Calderón wrote La cisma de Inglaterra (1627), relying on Ribadeneyra’s history of the English schism for much of his historical information. Mary was a relatively minor character in this play, yet her role in its ending had major impact. The final scene depicted Anne’s decapitated body at Mary’s feet as Henry VIII proclaimed her heir to the English throne (Henry’s subsequent wives and their offspring were not mentioned by Calderón). In accepting the title of Princess of Wales, Mary refused any concessions toward Protestant freedom of worship in her future reign, declaring: He will do well to believe that he who swears against and insults that which my faith professes, if I don’t burn him alive, it will be due to his repentance.52

Mary’s fervent Catholicism and reference to her future punishment of heretics would have been, according to Ann Mackenzie, “well received, without a doubt, by seventeenth-century censors and by fervently Roman Catholic audiences.”53 Yet Mackenzie and others have also suggested that such a dogmatic response demonstrated Calderón’s pessimism before a possible English Catholic future in 1627.54

52 “Hará muy bien, porque crea / que al que me jure y faltare / a lo que a mi ley profesa, / si no le quemare vivo / será porque se arrepienta.” Pedro Calderón de la Barca, La cisma de Inglaterra, ed. Francisco Ruíz Ramón (Madrid: Editorial Castalia, 1981), vv. 2963–67. 53 Ann Mackenzie, Introduction, The Schism in England (La cisma de Inglaterra) by Calderón de la Barca (Warminster: Aris and Phillips, 1990), 24. 54 For further discussion of Calderón’s pessimism see A.A. Parker “Henry VIII in Shakespeare and Calderón: An Appreciation of La cisma de Inglaterra” Modern Language

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In Calderón’s play, Mary was a polysemic figure who embodied the complexities of religious division in England. Such complexities were also foregrounded in Mary’s relationship to justice and vengeance—only the former lauded among the positive attributes necessary for kingship. In the final act of La cisma, Mary asked for justice after her mother’s death, but this request was quickly confused with vengeance against Anne Boleyn (recalled also in Mary’s pleasure at seeing her decapitated body). Calderón’s Mary, it is fair to say, had little to do with the exemplary queen Spaniards once knew, though they would have indeed been reminded of her unsuccessful life in the ending he presented. This Mary was the last one Spaniards would see in the century that followed her reign. England’s Catholic monarchs suffered through continued struggles in what remained of the seventeenth century, but in these Spain did not intervene. Spanish news pamphlets demonstrated public awareness of the struggles of Charles II, and they celebrated his return to the throne in 1660.55 They also recognized James II’s confrontations with Parliament and brought news of William of Orange’s coronation in 1689.56 Yet in these conflicts not one of the Catholic women—Mary I, Mary Stuart, or Catherine of Aragon—who had previously captured the Spanish imagination maintained relevance any longer. Only Mary Stuart returned to the Spanish stage for one final appearance when Spain and England again found themselves involved in conflict in the early eighteenth century, this time over a succession crisis in Spain. It seems that by this time, it was the martyr Mary, and not Mary I, who served best to elicit animosity against the English at a time when political intervention was not feasible.

Review 43.3 (1948): 347; and Francisco Ruíz Ramón, Introduction, La cisma de Inglaterra, ed. Francisco Ruíz Ramón (Madrid: Editorial Castalia, 1981), 54. 55 Spain was at war with England during the Interregnum. While contempt for

Cromwell was widespread in Spain, Philip IV did not officially intercede on Charles’s behalf. In 1660, when Charles reclaimed the English throne, pamphlets published news of his entry into London, celebrating his return. See, for example, Relación copiosa y verdadera de la entrada y coronacion del Serenissimo Rey de Inglaterra, en su Corte de Londres... (Barcelona: en casa de Antonio Lacaballería, 1660), Biblioteca de la Universidad de Barcelona, Mss. B-59/3/42-82. 56 See Razones que obligaron al rey de Inglaterra a retirarse de Rochester: escritas de su propia mano y publicadas por su orden (Zaragoza, 1689), https://archive.org/details/ A10902527/mode/2up. Further information regarding William of Orange’s ascension is recorded in a series of documents in 1690, titled Noticias principales y verdaderas, published in Brussels and San Sebastian.

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Conclusion By the seventeenth century, Spaniards had met multiple versions of England’s Catholic queen and their queen consort. When Mary I gained her crown, Spanish texts presented her as a powerful and capable ruler— a strong ally for Philip against France and one who would welcome his support in the fight to return England to the Catholic Church. After their marriage, Spanish authors continued to focus on Mary’s positive qualities as queen yet centered now on her religious devotion and the job she shared with Philip in ensuring the nation’s Catholic future. With the hope of an heir and the true faith restored, she became Saint Mary in Spanish eyes, transforming into a religious object of reverence with little agency as queen for all except Juan de Angulo, who in his praise of Mary compared her to the fearless Judith. After her death, Spain lost interest in their English queen, though she reappeared in moments when England regained relevance in the Spanish Empire’s foreign policy. During and after her reign, we witness the malleability of this particular queen’s image for a Spanish audience. Her image transformed according to Spain’s changing relationship with England and its aims in Europe through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Yet one would be hard pressed to find some of the characteristics a modern audience might expect of Mary I; her bloody reputation, weak leadership, and failed reforms did not appear in Spanish print. Instead, in the early modern Spanish sources studied here, we see the legacy of Mary’s strength and effectiveness as queen. In these texts, we find sources that point to the revision of her image that modern historians have since undertaken.

Bibliography Primary Calderón de la Barca, Pedro. La cisma de Inglaterra. Edited by Francisco Ruíz Ramón. Madrid: Editorial Castalia, 1981. Crónica del rey Enrico otavo de Inglaterra. Edited by Mariano Roca de Togores. Madrid: por Alfonso Durán, 1874. de Angulo, Juan. Flor de las solennes alegrias y fiestas que se hizieron en la Imperial ciudad de Toledo por la conversion del Reyno de Inglaterra. Toledo: en casa de Juan Ferrer, 1555. Biblioteca Nacional de España, R/10569. de Garibay y Zarolla, Esteban. Illustraciones geneologicas de los catholicos reyes de las Españas. Madrid: por Luis Sánchez, 1596.

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de Guaras, Antonio. Carta de nuevas de Antonio de Guaras, criado de la Serenísima y Católica Reina de Inglaterra, al Ilustre Señor Duque de Alburquerque…. In Relaciones de los reinados de Carlos V y Felipe II . Vol. 2. Edited by Amalio Huarte, 223–51. Madrid: Sociedad de Bibliófilos Españoles, 1950. de Herrera y Tordesillas, Antonio. Historia de lo sucedido en Escocia e Inglaterra en quarenta y quatro años que bivio Maria Estuarda, Reyna de Escocia. Madrid: en casa de Juan de Montoya, 1589. ———. Primera parte de la historia general del mundo, de XVII años del tiempo del señor Rey don Felipe Segundo el Prudente. Valladolid: por Juan Godinez Millis, 1606. La felicissima y muy alegre nueua de la reducion del Reyno de Inglaterra ala catholica union, y obediencia de la Sede Apostolica. Seville: Juan de Barrera, 1555. Biblioteca da Ajuda, 55-IV-18/2. Lope de Vega, Félix. La corona trágica: Vida y muerte de la serenísima reina de Escocia María Estuarda. Edited by Antonio Carreño-Rodríguez and A. Carreño. Madrid: Cátedra, 2014. Memorial, en el qual suplican los catolicos de Inglaterra al Serenissimo Principe de Gales, como por merced y don gratuito, despues de concluidos los casamientos, que su Alteza se sirva de dallos una Universidad en cada Reyno de los suyos… Seville: Matías Clavijo, 1623. Católogo y Biblioteca Digital de Relaciones de Sucesos (siglos XVI–XVII): Biblioteca Colombina y Capitular de Sevilla, 334-27-017. Muñoz, Andrés. Sumaria y verdadera relacion del buen viaje que el invictissimo Principe de las Españas don Felipe hizo a Inglaterra…. Zaragoza: en casa de Esteban de Nagera, 1554. Biblioteca Nacional de España, Mss. R/1751. Nuevas de la guerra. Traslado de una carta que Christoval Vasquez de Avila embio del campo de su Magestad al Ilustrisimo y muy excelente señor duque de Medina Sidonia: en que le da relación de la victoria que Magestad ha avido contra sus enemigos. 1553. Biblioteca Nacional de España, R/29839. Razones que obligaron al rey de Inglaterra a retirarse de Rochester: escritas de su propia mano y publicadas por su orden. Zaragoza, 1689. https://archive.org/ details/A10902527/mode/2up. Relación copiosa y verdadera de la entrada y coronacion del Serenissimo Rey de Inglaterra, en su Corte de Londres … Barcelona: en casa de Antonio Lacaballería, 1660. Biblioteca de la Universidad de Barcelona, Mss. B59/3/42-82. Relación de las Rebeliones en Inglaterra. In José Solís de Santos, “Relaciones de sucesos de Inglaterra en el reinado de Carlos V.” In Testigo del tiempo, memoria del universo: cultura escrita y sociedad en el mundo ibérico (siglos XV–XVIII), edited by Manual Fernández, Carlos-Alberto González Sánchez, and Natalia Millard Álvarez, 640–98. Barcelona: Publicaciones de l’abadia de Montserrat, 2009.

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Relacion de un sacerdote Ingles, escrita a Flandes, a un caballero de su tierra, desterrado por ser Catolico, en la qual le da cuenta de la venida de su Magestad a Valladolid, y al Colegio de los Ingleses, y lo que alli se hizo en su recibimiento. Madrid: por Pedro Madrigal, 1592. de Ribadeneyra, Pedro. Historia ecclesiastica del scisma del Reyno de Inglaterra. Madrid: por Pedro Madrigal, 1588. de Yepes, Diego. Historia particular de la persecución de Inglaterra Madrid 1599. Edited by D.M. Rogers. Western Germany: Gregg International Publishers Limited, 1971.

Secondary Colbert, Carolyn. “‘Well Then…Hail Mary’: Mary I in The Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyatt (1607) and Lady Jane (1986).” In The Birth of a Queen Essays on the Quincentenary of Mary I , edited by Sarah Duncan and Valerie Schutte, 215–32. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Domínguez, Freddy Cristóbal. Radicals in Exile: English Catholic Books During the Reign of Philip II . University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020. Doran, Susan. “A ‘Sharp Rod’ of Chastisement: Mary I Through Protestant Eyes During the Reign of Elizabeth I.” In Mary Tudor: Old and New Perspectives, edited by Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman, 21–36. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Doran, Susan and Thomas S. Freeman, eds. Mary Tudor: Old and New Perspectives. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Duncan, Sarah. Mary I: Gender, Power, and Ceremony in the Reign of England’s First Queen. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. ———. “‘Most Godly Heart Fraight with All Mercie’: Queens’ Mercy During the Reigns of Mary I and Elizabeth I.” In Queens and Power in Medieval and Early Modern England, edited by Carole Levin and Robert Bucholz, 31–52. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009. Grant, Teresa. “‘Thus Like a Nun, Not Like a Princess Born’: Dramatic Representations of Mary Tudor in the Early Seventeenth Century.” In Mary Tudor: Old and New Perspectives, edited by Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman, 62–77. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Hunt, Alice and Anna Whitlock, eds. Tudor Queenship: The Reigns of Mary and Elizabeth. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Kagan, Richard. Clio and the Crown: The Politics of History in Medieval and Early Modern Spain. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. Mackenzie, Ann. Introduction. In The Schism in England (La cisma de Inglaterra) by Calderón de la Barca. Warminster: Aris and Phillips, 1990.

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Nadal, Santiago. Las cuatro mujeres de Felipe II. Barcelona: Editorial Juventud, 1971. Parker, A.A. “Henry VIII in Shakespeare and Calderón: An Appreciation of La cisma de Inglaterra.” Modern Language Review 43, no. 3 (1948): 327–52. Pérez Martín, María Jesús. María Tudor: La gran reina desconocida, 4th edition. Madrid: Rialp, 2018. Redworth, Glynn. “‘Matters Impertinent to Women’: Male and Female Monarchy Under Philip and Mary.” The English Historical Review 112, no. 447 (1997): 597–613. ———. “¿Nuevo mundo u otro mundo? Conquistadores cortesanos, libros de caballerías.” Actas del I Congreso Anglo-Hispano 3 (1994): 113–25. Ruíz Ramón, Francisco. Introducción. In La cisma de Inglaterra, edited by Francisco Ruíz Ramón. Madrid: Editorial Castalia, 1981. Samson, Alexander. “A Fine Romance: Anglo-Spanish Relations in the Sixteenth Century.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31, no. 9 (Winter 2009): 65–94. ———. “Changing Places: The Marriage and Royal Entry of Philip, Prince of Austria, and Mary Tudor, July-August 1554.” The Sixteenth Century Journal 36, no. 3 (2005): 761–84. ———. Mary and Philip: The Marriage of Tudor England and Habsburg Spain. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020. Solís de Santos, José. “Relaciones de sucesos de Inglaterra en el reinado de Carlos V.” In Testigo del tiempo, memoria del universo: cultura y escrita y sociedad en el mundo ibérico (siglos XV–XVIII), edited by Manual Fernández, CarlosAlberto González Sánchez, and Natalia Millard Álvarez, 640–98. Barcelona: Publicaciones de l’abadia de Montserrat, 2009. Warnicke, Retha. “Mary I, Queen of England: Historiographical Essay, 2006 to Present.” In The Birth of a Queen Essays on the Quincentenary of Mary I , edited by Sarah Duncan and Valerie Schutte, 255–72. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

Images of Mary I in Modern Spanish Media Tamara Pérez-Fernández

On the evening of May 19, 2020, La 1 de Radiotelevisión Española (henceforth RTVE), the Spanish public network, aired the thirty-seventh installment of one of its most popular TV series, El Ministerio del Tiempo.1 The episode followed the series’ usual pattern: a group of Spanish characters from different eras are sent to the past by an organization called the Ministry of Time in order to untangle a glitch in History’s flow and keep the future (and the present) undisturbed. In this episode, and as an exception in the group’s usual missions, they must deal with a foreign affair: the 1554 murder of the future Queen Elizabeth I, poisoned in her youth at the orders of her sister, a newly crowned Mary I. A plucky coterie of characters from different historical periods (a policeman from the 1980s, a soldier from the tercios, and a woman from the 1960s) are sent back in 1 El Ministerio del Tiempo, Season 4, episode 3, “Bloody Mary Hour,” directed by Catxo López, aired May 19, 2020, on La 1 de Radiotelevisión Española, https://www.rtve.es/alacarta/videos/el-ministerio-del-tiempo/ministerio-deltiempo-temporada-4-capitulo-3-bloody-mary-hour/5577441/.

T. Pérez-Fernández (B) University of Valladolid, Valladolid, Spain e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 V. Schutte and J. S. Hower (eds.), Writing Mary I, Queenship and Power, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95132-0_7

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time to Hampton Court to stop the murder from happening. The episode is provocatively—and perhaps inevitably—titled “Bloody Mary Hour.” This reimagining of a past shared by Spain and England brings to light places and historical characters unfamiliar to Spanish audiences, and it also serves to project a very defined image of one of its main protagonists: Mary I of England. She is a fundamental figure not only to understand the English Renaissance, but also to interpret one of Spain’s most illustrious periods, a time of political strength and expansion, where Mary’s role has been repeatedly ignored. The last two decades have seen a reappraisal of Mary by English- and Spanish-speaking historians, who have strived to offer a more nuanced— and perhaps fairer—assessment of her life and merits that attempts to reverse some of the most commonly-held assumptions about her, which have tinged the popular imagination of England’s first queen regnant for centuries.2 Coinciding with this new scholarly interest in Mary, and in the wake of a renewed interest in the history of Spain as entertainment material,3 the Spanish media have produced a modest number of pieces that bring the relatively unknown figure of Mary I to the Spanish public. From blog posts and twitter threads to newspaper articles and episodes in historical and fictionalized TV series, Spanish audiences are becoming more conscious of Mary and her importance. However, the pieces studied in this chapter show some of the biases and inaccuracies that have plagued Marian historiography until recently, and she is often misinterpreted and lampooned. Other works have explored Mary’s portrayals in English fiction, but none so far have attempted to look at the Spanish media for an assessment of the perception of her figure in a country that does not seem to consider

2 See Alexander Samson, Mary and Philip: The Marriage of Tudor England and Habsburg Spain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020), 1–14; Mª Jesús Pérez Martín, María Tudor, la gran reina desconocida (Madrid: Rialp, 2008); Susan Doran and Thomas Freeman, eds., Mary Tudor: Old and New Perspectives (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); John Edwards, Mary I: The Daughter of Time (London: Allen Lane, 2016); or Sarah Duncan and Valerie Schutte, eds., The Birth of a Queen: Essays on the Quincentenary of Mary I (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). 3 El Ministerio del Tiempo can be understood as part of a surge in the TV series that revolve around Spanish historical characters and events from the far past (Hispania, la leyenda [2010–2012], Isabel [2012–2014], Águila Roja [2009–2016]) all the way to the later twentieth century (14 de abril. La República [2011–2019], Cuéntame cómo pasó [2001–]).

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her as part of its past, possibly because she never set foot in Spain and because her support of her husband’s enterprises (most notably at SaintQuentin) remains largely unknown.4 In this chapter, I will analyze the public perception of Mary I in modern Spain as manifested in articles and TV shows produced by the Spanish media in the last two decades to assess how she is presented to the Spanish public. I will examine the media’s characterizations of Mary and how they draw on other historical characters that are more familiar to Spanish audiences—such as Isabella I, Henry VIII, Philip II, or Elizabeth I—to establish a framework that allows the public to understand Mary both as part of the history of England and as a piece of the Spanish past. I will also show how her legacy has been interpreted, and the main characteristics that authors and TV producers attribute her. I will contend that, in spite of the efforts by later historians to re-examine Mary’s controversial figure in a new light, her portrayals in the Spanish media still fail to provide a truly nuanced picture of Mary and her reign. Furthermore, I will argue that, notwithstanding the cultural and religious distance between the England of the sixteenth century and twenty-first century Spain, the modern image of Mary in Spain is largely a distillation of the Bloody Mary myth fostered by early modern Protestant historiography. Due to the brevity of this chapter, and in an attempt to limit the corpus of documents to those showing the most current approaches to Mary, I have selected sixteen pieces published in the Spanish media since the year 2000 whose focus is, solely or in part, Mary I; of those pieces, twelve are articles published in Spanish national, regional, or local newspapers (usually in sections devoted to history), two are radio programs, one is an article published on a financial website, and another an article on

4 See Sue Parrill and William B. Robinson, The Tudors on Film and Television (Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland & Company, 2013); William B. Robinson, “Stripped of Their Altars: Film, Faith, and Tudor Royal Women from the Silent Era to the Twenty-First Century, 1895–2014,” in Women during the English Reformations, eds. J. A. Chappell and K. A. Kramer (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 145–78; and “Marrying Mary to the Black Legend: Anti-Catholicism and Anti-Marian Messages in Anglo-American Films about Philip II of Spain,” in The Birth of a Queen: Essays on the Quincentenary of Mary I , eds. Sarah Duncan and Valerie Schutte (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 233–54.

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RTVE’s website.5 This sample covers a large part of the Spanish sociopolitical spectrum, from the far-right El Correo de España to conservative newspapers like El Español, ABC, El Mundo, or Libertad Digital, liberalleaning publications like El Confidencial, and the left-center El País. The pieces analyzed in this chapter present portraits of Mary that range from lurid melodramatic accounts of her life to thoughtful pieces on her legacy. Conservative media show more interest for Mary than the more progressive media, but, in general, there are no outstanding differences in the way she is approached by either. Considered together, these articles lay bare some of the defining traits that have come to characterize Mary I in the consciousness of contemporary Spain: physically unattractive, mentally unstable, extremely religious, a victim of her parents’ unhappy marriage, the lovelorn and heartbroken wife to a man who did not love her, and, above all, bloody.

Images of Mary I in the Spanish Media The sixteenth century was an eventful period in Spain, a place that had to come to terms with its own national identity as its boundaries expanded to comprehend vast, foreign spaces in Europe and the Americas; las Españas, the recent coalescence of various kingdoms that came to be ruled by the Habsburgs, became the major player in the European political scene and, as such, it concerned itself with all matters pertaining to the solidity of its empire and the strength of Catholicism that was one of the foundations of its power.6 It is no wonder, then, that Spain and England stoked mutual apprehension in one another, first in the context of their relations with France and then as antagonistic religious and imperialistic forces. In this framework, the main historical figures from both sides have acquired an almost mythical status: Henry VIII and Elizabeth I on the one hand, and the Catholic Monarchs, Charles V, and Philip II on the other, are, on their own and each for their own reasons, monumental figures who are part of England’s and Spain’s collective sense of nation 5 The decision to exclude other formats like blog entries or social media was taken in order to focus on professionally written pieces that had the capacity to reach a larger number of people from all ages and backgrounds. 6 See William S. Maltby, The Rise and Fall of the Spanish Empire (New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), or Henry Kamen, Empire: How Spain Became a World Power, 1492–1763 (New York: HarperCollins, 2003).

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and national identity even now. In their midst, Mary I remains an opaque figure both in Spain and in England, a victim of the brevity of her reign and of the bad press that has dogged her for centuries despite her exceptional position in both countries. The first regnant Queen of England, and the only queen in her own right to become queen consort of Spain, is referred to simply as “María Tudor” in the titles of ten out of the sixteen pieces considered for this chapter.7 This denomination strips Mary of her queenly status while also subtly denigrating her within her own family, since Henry, Edward, or Elizabeth, who were as much Tudors as Mary, are usually given their proper royal title.8 Most of the pieces about Mary in the Spanish newspapers were published in specific sections dedicated to history, so the general approach to her figure is almost exclusively a vaguely historiographical one.9 The majority start by describing the family ties between Mary and Henry VIII, Charles V, Philip II, or the Catholic Monarchs. This is understandable,

7 Only one article describes her as “María I de Inglaterra” in the title: R. Alonso, “María I de Inglaterra: ¿Fue tan cruel y sanguinaria como la pinta la Leyenda Negra?” ABC, November 2, 2018, https://www.abc.es/historia/abci-maria-inglaterra-cruel-y-san guinaria-como-pinta-leyenda-negra-201811010208_noticia.html. Curiously, the data from Google Books Ngram Viewer on the number of books in Spanish that mention “María Tudor” shows a decrease from the year 2000. On the contrary, mentions of the phrase “María I de Inglaterra” spike noticeably in the same time frame. This shows the reexamination of her character in more academic settings; we can only hope that the media catch up with that trend in the future. 8 Joseph Pérez explains that Mary is known as Mary Tudor because she was born in that dynasty, but he fails to disclose why this was not applied to her father or siblings. Joseph Pérez, “María Tudor o ‘Bloody Mary’: una reina Inglesa para Felipe II,” El Mundo, February 18, 2016, https://www.elmundo.es/la-aventura-de-la-historia/2016/ 02/18/56c5993746163f20168b4660.html. 9 Pérez’s article features in a section called “The Adventure of History” (“La Aventura de la Historia”), Juan Carlos Losada’s piece for El País is included in a subsection remarkably called “Evil people in history” (“Malos de la historia”), whereas Álvaro Van den Brule’s contribution is published within a miscellaneous section in El Confidencial called “Soul, Heart, Life” (“Alma, Corazón, Vida”). Only the article in El Correo de España is featured in the politics section. See Juan Carlos Losada, “La reina sanguinaria,” El País, June 16, 2005, https://elpais.com/diario/2005/10/ 16/eps/1129444015_850215.html; Álvaro Van den Brule, “El matrimonio entre ‘La reina sangrienta’ y ‘El rey prudente’: Felipe II y María Tudor,” El Confidencial, April 13, 2019, https://www.elconfidencial.com/alma-corazon-vida/2019-04-13/un-mat rimonio-breve-felipe-ii-maria-tudor_1938142/; Editorial office, “Descubre a la ‘sangrienta’ María Tudor,” El Correo de España, 11 December 2014, https://elcorreodeespana.com/ politica/50892569/descubre-a-la-sangrienta-maria-tudor.html.

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since it is a way to pinpoint Mary at a specific time and place with references to other, well-known historical characters. However, it is intriguing to see that her mother Catherine of Aragón is usually the only other historical figure that needs further explanation.10 Juan Carlos Losada introduces both of them in the following way: “[Mary] was the daughter of Catherine, who was herself the daughter of the Catholic Monarchs, and of the famous Henry VIII.”11 There is no need for the author to add that Henry was the son of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, probably because that piece of information is not one of the traits that define him in the mind of the Spanish readers, who instead recognize him as a larger-than-life character with a penchant for beheading his wives.12 The authors emphasize his decision to divorce Catherine and marry Anne Boleyn: half the pieces mention it, which seems to cement the belief that this event marked Mary’s life for the worse. References to Mary and Catherine’s banishment from the court and their forced separation are included in several texts that offer a more in-depth historical background: César Cervera covers Mary’s “turbulent childhood” from the perspective of her parents’ discord. In a departure from English historiography, which has traditionally praised Catherine for her dignity and resilience, Cervera seems to blame her for the poor situation that Mary had to endure. He calls her “obstinate” and points out that her refusal to allow Mary to be stripped of her title was the reason why both sides could not reach

10 See Pérez, “María Tudor o ‘Bloody Mary’”; D. B., “María Tudor, la asesina

de protestantes que avivó la Leyenda Negra española,” El Español, October 29, 2018, https://www.elespanol.com/cultura/historia/20181029/protestantes-culpablemaria-sanguinaria-leyenda-negra-espanola/349215383_0.html; or César Cervera, “La traición más cruel de Felipe II hacia su esposa inglesa María ‘la sanguinaria’,” ABC, October 17, 2018, https://www.abc.es/historia/abci-traicion-mas-cruel-felipe-hacia-esp osa-inglesa-maria-sanguinaria-201810160247_noticia.html. 11 “Era hija de Catalina, que a su vez lo era de los Reyes Católicos, y del célebre Enrique VIII.” Losada, “La reina sanguinaria.” All translations are my own unless specified. 12 Henry’s portrayal in the Spanish media is often negative, focused mainly on the most macabre episodes of his reign and on his penchant for beheadings. See Van den Brule, “El matrimonio”; Nieves Concostrina, “Felipe II, el rey que viajó a Inglaterra para casarse de mala gana con su tía segunda,” Acontece que no es poco, Cadena SER, July 6, 2017, audio, 3:13, https://cadenaser.com/programa/2017/07/06/la_ventana/1499366729_4 53814.html; and “Enrique VIII: la brutalidad anticatólica del rey decapitador de esposas sale de nuevo a la luz,” ABC, May 6, 2018, https://www.abc.es/historia/abci-enriqueviii-brutalidad-anticatolica-decapitador-esposas-sale-nuevo-201805060936_noticia.html.

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an agreement.13 In “Mary Tudor: the shrill queen,” the author directly attributes the negative aspects of Mary’s character—“despotic, unstable, and of unpredictable reactions”—to the ignominies she suffered as a child, including the celebration of her mother’s death at court.14 In this context, her strong religious convictions became vital: according to Juan Carlos Losada, her Catholic faith was her safe space in an adverse environment.15 Mary’s devotion to Catholicism is one of her traits that is often highlighted in the articles in the Spanish media, with ten pieces mentioning her strong Catholic convictions. Only two of them, however, refer to her acceptance of her father’s position as head of the Church of England. In one of them, Cervera recounts Mary’s oath to the Act of Supremacy as the only way to regain a privileged position at court.16 Pedro Fernández Barbadillo, in ES Radio, offers a different perspective of Mary’s motivations, stating that she made that decision in order to survive.17 In fact, he goes so far as to call her a “martyr” on account of the suffering she endured to defend her faith and reinstate it in England.18 In this sense, Mary’s religious stance is inextricably linked to her Spanish relatives, Charles V and Philip II, as the support offered by Charles becomes central to understand Mary and her later decision to marry Philip.19 In his article for El País, Juan Carlos Losada suggests

13 Cervera, “La traición.” 14 “[D]espótica, inestable y de reacciones imprevisibles.” “María Tudor: la reina estri-

dente,” Finanzas.com, accessed December 27, 2020, https://www.finanzas.com/hemero teca/maria-tudor-la-reina-estridente_13883805_102.html. 15 Losada, “La reina sanguinaria.” 16 Cervera, “La traición.” 17 Pedro Fernández Barbadillo, “María Tudor, sola en una isla,” Perfiles reales, ES Radio, September 22, 2018, audio, 4:50, https://esradio.libertaddigital.com/ fonoteca/2018-09-22/perfiles-reales-maria-tudor-sola-en-una-isla-128483.html. However, neither Fernández Barbadillo nor Cervera mention that her taking the oath to the Act of Supremacy meant her de facto—if unwilling and insincere—rejection of Catholicism. 18 Pedro Fernández Barbadillo, “En socorro de una mártir: María Tudor,” Libertad Digital, August 14, 2010, https://www.libertaddigital.com/opinion/pedro-fernandez-bar badillo/en-socorro-de-una-martir-maria-tudor-65238/. 19 The outrageously titled “Mary Tudor: the shrill queen” states that Mary’s Catholic faith was “the nexus between her and her Habsburg relatives, particularly emperor Charles V, from whom she received advice” (“Su fe en el catolicismo constituyó un nexo de unión con su familia Habsburgo, en especial con el emperador Carlos V, de quien recibía consejo”). In Finanzas.com, “La reina estridente.”

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that it was only the threat of Charles V (against England and the Papacy), and the support of part of the English aristocracy, that saved her during her ordeal away from the court.20 Fernández Barbadillo frames the political maneuvers devised by Charles as a way to keep Mary in the throne of England. After her difficult accession to the throne, Mary’s situation as an unmarried Catholic queen gave her a pivotal position in the mechanics of the empire under her cousin Charles V.21 The strategic importance of a Catholic England in the Empire’s ongoing wars against France was not inconsequential, as an alliance with Mary’s England would be a means to defend Charles’s possessions in Flanders from the attacks of the French king Henry II. At the same time, supporting Mary on the throne of England would lay a firmer ground for the complete reinstatement of Catholicism in the country and stymying the advance of Protestantism in the continent.22 This twofold approach to the suitability of a marriage between Mary and Philip is noted in eight of the pieces, and it intimates Mary’s centrality in European political and religious affairs while at the same time placing her as a pawn in Charles’s hands. The general tendency in the pieces published in the Spanish media is to downplay her agency in this regard, but some authors do take into account Mary’s own reasons to accept the marriage proposal: Losada notes Mary’s urgency to marry and have an heir in order to safeguard the reintroduction of Catholicism in England,23 while Pérez explains that Mary “wanted to keep her half-sister Elizabeth away from the throne at all costs.”24

20 Losada, “La reina sanguinaria.” 21 One of the articles notes Mary’s surprise as she became “the most appe-

tizing snack among the heirs to the European royal houses” (“el bocado más apetitoso entre los herederos de las casa reales europeas”). In Mónica Calderón, “La simpática, la enamorada y la puta: Las mujeres de Felipe II,” RTVE, January 25, 2016, https://www.rtve.es/television/20160125/mujeres-felipe-ii-maria-tudor-mariamanuela-portugal-isabel-osorio-puta-del-rey/1288004.shtml. 22 Notably, Pérez reflects on Philip’s later desire to avoid Mary Stuart, Catholic but

with close family ties with France, in the throne of England and on his work to protect Elizabeth’s Protestant England from Scotland and France. See Pérez, “María Tudor o ‘Bloody Mary’.” 23 Losada, “La reina sanguinaria.” 24 “[Q]uería apartar del trono a cualquier precio a su hermanastra Isabel.” In Van den

Brule, “El matrimonio.”

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One aspect of Mary and Philip’s marriage that has been focused on in Spanish media is the disparity in age, beauty, and character of the spouses. The pieces relish the age difference between the couple, and how hard it was for Philip to acquiesce to the marriage: six articles call attention to the fact that the “alarming” eleven-year age gap between Mary (who was thirty-eight at the time) and Philip (only twenty-seven) was an almost insurmountable problem, especially when the main objective was to produce an heir.25 This was only compounded by Mary’s unseemliness: she is described as generally unattractive, especially in contrast with Philip, who was not only younger, but so good-looking that Mary fell in love with him after seeing his portrait.26 Some of the articles take a more sensationalistic stance and cruelly reference Mary’s physical decay: in a particularly vicious piece, Mary was described as ugly, toothless, bald, scrawny, and suffering from bleeding gums.27 The same author affirms that beauty “avoided her at birth,”28 while another suggests that she had lost her reportedly good looks with age.29 Nieves Concostrina quips that, at almost forty, Mary was still a virgin because men were not interested in her.30 Mónica Calderón paints Mary as terrified of Philip’s attractiveness, youth, and “voluptuousness.”31 This unbalanced approach to Mary and Philip also relies on the differences in their characters.32 Philip, who is commonly known as “the prudent king,” is depicted as a capable statesman because he submitted to the marriage in spite of the unappealing prospect of wedding his older, unattractive second cousin. His pragmatism and lack of romantic interest in Mary are evidenced in his infamous words before he left Spain in the summer of 1554, which are quoted in an article published in El Español: “I am not going to a 25 Calderón, “La simpática.” 26 Philip is called “cute” in one radio program, and in another article he is a “handsome

lad.” See Concostrina, “El rey que viajó”; and Finanzas.com, “La reina estridente.” 27 “María Tudor, la reina borde y odiada,” ABC, July 28, 2018, https://www.abc.es/ historia/abci-maria-tudor-reina-borde-y-odiada-201807281535_video.html. 28 “[L]a belleza física la esquivó al nacer.” See ABC, “La reina borde y odiada.” 29 Losada, “La reina sanguinaria.” 30 Concostrina, “El rey que viajó.” 31 Calderón, “La simpática.” 32 This is best illustrated by the title of Álvaro Van den Brulen’s article, “The marriage between the ‘Bloody Queen’ and the ‘Prudent King’: Philip II and Mary Tudor.” See Van den Brulen, “El matrimonio.”

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wedding, but to fight.”33 Mary, on the other hand, is represented as desperately in love, but her difficult character and unappealing looks made it unable for Philip to return her affection.34 This degradation of Mary’s image is common in the Spanish media, and although it has undoubtedly been exaggerated over time, some of its core attributes originated in sixteenth-century Spanish sources. The early chroniclers of Philip’s voyage to England commented unfavorably on Mary’s looks and spirits, all the while presenting Philip in an extremely positive light. Florián de Ocampo, royal historian, provided a mixed portrayal, writing that “the queen is not beautiful: she is small, in poor health, and it would not be a bad thing if she were younger, but being such a brave woman makes good the rest, which is what matters.”35 Similarly, an anonymous Spanish correspondent who had accompanied Philip in his first trip to England confided that “the queen is not at all beautiful, since she is small and more skinny than fat, very pale and blond; she does not have eyebrows; she is a saint; she dresses badly.”36 A letter from Philip’s favorite Ruy Gómez de Silva criticizes Mary’s appearance and extols Philip’s sacrifice: I believe that if she dressed in our fashions she would not look so old and flabby. To speak frankly with you, it will take a great God to drink from this cup. I have made every preparation for doing my share; and the best of it is that the King fully realizes that the marriage was concluded for no

33 “Yo no parto para una fiesta nupcial, sino para una cruzada.” In D. B. “La asesina.” A similar quotation is attributed to Philip by historian Andrés Muñoz: “Yo no voy a bodas, sino a pelear.” See Andrés Muñoz, “Viaje de Felipe II à Inglaterra,” in Viaje de Felipe II à Inglaterra... y relaciones varias relativas al mismo suceso, ed. Pascual de Gayangos (Madrid: Sociedad de bibliófilos españoles, 1867), 1–85, here 7. 34 Finanzas.com, “La reina estridente.” 35 “La Reyna no es hermosa: es mujer menuda, de poca disposición, y no importara

poco que tuviera menos años, pero con ser mujer de tanto valor suple lo demás, que esso es lo que importa.” Florián de Ocampo, Noticias de varios sucesos acaecidos , desde el año de 1521 hasta el 1558; copiadas de un códice escrito de mano de Florián de Ocampo. Vol. II (Madrid: Biblioteca Nacional de España, MS 9937), fol. 126v. 36 “[L]a Reina no es nada hermosa, pues es pequeña y más flaca que gorda, es muy

blanca y rubia; no tiene cejas; es una sancta; viste muy mal.” In “Carta en la cual se da Relación de lo que ha pasado en el reino de Inglaterra después que el Príncipe Don Felipe entró en él,” in Viaje de Felipe II à Inglaterra... y relaciones varias relativas al mismo suceso, ed. Pascual de Gayangos (Madrid: Sociedad de bibliófilos españoles, 1867), 105–14, here 106.

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fleshly consideration, but in order to remedy the disorders of this Kingdom and preserve the Low Countries...37

Parts of this quotation have been picked up in five Spanish articles, and the subtly cruel “it will take a great God to drink from this cup” is particularly popular.38 However, a previous letter by Gómez de Silva, where he asserts that the queen was “a very good creature,” has been ignored.39 Other letters and relaciones describe the couple as harmonious, emphasizing Philip’s efforts to please Mary but at the same time pointing out that he was also pleased with her. In his second letter, Gómez de Silva himself comments that “the Queen is very happy with the King, and the King with her.”40 In a move that shows the lack of a fair approach to Mary, the Spanish media pick the negative descriptions of her physique found in the Spanish chronicles of the sixteenth century, but not the more positive accounts of her character included in the same texts. The brave woman in Muñoz’s Viaje de Felipe II a Inglaterra (1554), the “lioness that showed more courage than the bravest man in the world” in the anonymous Relación muy verdadera de las rebelliones que ha audio en el Reyno de Inglaterra (1554),41 or the measured, clement queen in Pedro de Ribadeneyra’s

37 Rui Gómez de Silva, “Rui Gómez de Silva to Francisco de Eraso, 29 July 1554,” in Calendar of State Papers, Spain, Volume 13, 1554–1558, ed. Royall Tyler (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1954), 1–13, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/cal-state-pap ers/spain/vol13/pp1-13. Original Spanish letter translated into English by the editors. 38 “[M]ucho Dios es menester para tragar este cáliz.” In Calderón, “La simpática”; Cervera, “La traición”; D. B., “La asesina”; J. B., J. B. “Felipe nunca la creyó: así fue el trágico embarazo psicológico de María Tudor,” El Español, February 21, 2020, https://www.elespanol.com/cultura/historia/20200221/felipe-ii-tragico-emb arazo-psicologico-maria-tudor/466454215_0.html; and Finanzas.com, “La reina estridente.” This statement also appears in the “Bloody Mary Hour” episode of El Ministerio del Tiempo. See analysis below. 39 Rui Gómez de Silva, “Rui Gómez de Silva to Francisco de Eraso, 27 July 1554,” in Calendar of State Papers, Spain, Volume 13, 1554–1558, ed. Royall Tyler (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1954), 1–13, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/cal-state-pap ers/spain/vol13/pp1-13. 40 Gómez de Silva, “29 July 1554.” 41 “[E]staba hecha una leona y mostraba mayor ánimo que el más valiente hombre

del mundo pudiera mostrar.” Relación muy verdadera de las rebelliones que ha auido en el Reyno de Inglaterra, in José Solís de Santos, “Relaciones de sucesos de Inglaterra en el reinado de Carlos V,” in Testigo del tiempo, memoria del universo: cultura y escrita y

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Historia eclesiástica del cisma del reino de Inglaterra (1557) are all but forgotten.42 In their stead, Mary is variously described as nasty, a shrill sourpuss with an inferiority complex, intransigent, ill-humored, cruel, repressive, depressive, unstable, despotic, and, above all, bloody. She is identified as “María la Sanguinaria” or “Bloody Mary” in fourteen of the sixteen pieces analyzed here, and fifteen describe the Marian persecutions in varying degrees of detail.43 Six clarify that “bloody” was an epithet given by Protestant historiographers as a result of the persecutions, and three authors name John Foxe or John Knox as the architects of the anti-Marian propaganda, but there are no attempts to paint her in another light.44 Six pieces use “sanguinaria” or “bloody” in their titles, a decision that undoubtedly serves to catch the reader’s attention, but which also preserves and perpetuates the myth. Moreover, the epithet appears in the articles in English and Spanish indistinctly, which hints at the wide penetration of the phrase “Bloody Mary” in Spanish awareness: “bloody” is not simply a term that describes Mary’s political decisions; its main function is as a means of identification, a way for Spanish audiences to recognize the relatively obscure Mary I as the infamous—but better-known—“Bloody Mary.” By contrast, only one article refers to the fact that Mary was also the queen consort of Spain: a press release by Agencia EFE covering the celebration of her quincentenary emphasizes Mary’s great relevance as the first woman to inherit the crown of England, and the fact that for two years she was both Queen of England and Queen consort of Spain.45 No

sociedad en el mundo ibérico (siglos XV-XVIII), eds. Manual Fernández, Carlos-Alberto González Sánchez, and Natalia Millard Álvarez (Barcelona: Publicaciones de l’abadia de Montserrat, 2009), 677–81, here 679. 42 Pedro de Ribadeneyra, Historia Eclesiástica del cisma de Inglaterra (Madrid: Imprenta y Librería de D. Manuel Martín, 1781). 43 While most of the articles merely mention the attacks on Protestants, other authors give more thorough accounts concerning the fates of Thomas Cranmer, Thomas Wyatt, and Jane Grey. See Pérez “María Tudor o ‘Bloody Mary’”; Cervera, “La traición”; and Van der Brule, “El matrimonio.” 44 Calderón, “La enamorada”; Alonso, “Fue tan cruel”; Vidal Arranz, “Reivindicando el honor de María Tudor,” El Norte de Castilla, 18 June 2018, https://www.elnortede castilla.es/culturas/reivindicando-honor-maria-20180618123432-nt.html. 45 This celebration, organized by a Spanish historical association, reasserts the idea of a nascent interest in Mary as part of the Spanish past. Susana Martínez Monfort, “El Reino Unido celebra el 500 aniversario del nacimiento de María Tudor,” El Periódico de Aragón,

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other author echoes this piece of information. Nevertheless, Philip’s position as King of England is widely discussed (both in the Spanish media and in the early chronicles), his more measured policies contrasted with Mary’s aggressive ones. For example, the authors agree that Philip tried to reverse the cold welcome he had received in England with generous gifts and displays of good will toward the Protestants, like his mediation in Elizabeth’s liberation after Thomas Wyatt’s plot.46 Mary, however, showed no mercy to her enemies, and supported by her marriage to Philip she embarked upon “her purifying job.”47 Her actions, though, rarely cast a shadow over Philip’s own. This imbalance in the approaches to both spouses, with Philip almost always getting the better treatment, shows a peculiar mixture of choice elements of Spanish pro-Philip propaganda and English anti-Marian efforts that demonstrates the lack of a proper research in many of the articles. However, not all the pieces present completely unfavorable depictions of Mary. Losada, who mentioned Mary’s zealous efforts toward purification tries to balance this negative portrayal with an admiration of her other qualities, like her “exquisite culture and an undoubtedly strong personality, forged in the adversities she suffered.”48 Three more pieces partially exculpate the queen by arguing that, although the persecutions were dramatic, Mary was far from being the only monarch who resorted to those extreme measures, citing Henry VIII’s and Elizabeth I’s attacks on the Catholic population.49 A more sympathetic piece was published in the local newspaper El Norte de Castilla on June 18, 2018, on the occasion of the publication of a new edition of the book María Tudor.

February 18, 2016, https://www.elperiodicodearagon.com/noticias/aragon/reino-unidocelebra-500-aniversario-nacimiento-maria-tudor_1089097.html. 46 Losada states that Mary’s love for him was so great that she could not deny his petitions. See Losada, “La reina sanguinaria.” 47 Losada, “La reina sanguinaria.” 48 “Poseía otros atractivos, como una exquisita cultura y una indudable personalidad

forjada en las adversidades sufridas.” In Losada, “La reina sanguinaria.” But even this piece, fairer than most of the other articles, was published in the section “Evil people in history,” in El País. 49 Losada, “La reina sanguinaria”; Calderón, “La simpática”; and D. B., “La asesina.”

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La gran reina desconocida, by María Jesús Pérez Martín.50 Both the book and the article denounce the anti-Marian propaganda and portray Mary in an extremely positive light, as a cultivated, hard-working, compassionate woman, to “tear down the wall of hate built against Mary Tudor.”51 Yet, no other author is more resolutely apologetic of Mary than Pedro Fernández Barbadillo. The two pieces that he produced for Libertad Digital suggest that Mary was justified in her attacks on the Protestants because a preacher had asked God for Mary’s untimely death. Fernández Barbadillo describes the persecutions as “short,” and only “against some Protestants,” and that they “cannot be compared with [the persecution] under Henry VIII not with, after 1559, Elizabeth I’s.”52 Fernández Barbadillo does not give data to support his statements, but in his article for El País, Losada provides evidence that contradicts this view, contextualizing the 283 victims of the four-year Marian persecutions with the 316 people executed from 1535 to 1679 under Protestant rule. Furthermore, he alludes to the fact that most of the victims were ordinary people, which adds yet another unfavorable shade to Mary’s portrayal.53 While there is not a definite political bias in the portrayals of Mary in the Spanish media, these two articles do reflect a certain subjectivity when it comes to her legacy. Fernández Barbadillo is a vocal right-wing journalist and writer, and his pieces about Mary were published by the conservative multimedia group Libertad Digital, with strong links with the Catholic Church. With the author’s staunch defense of Mary and her persecutions and the thought-provoking presentation of Mary as a martyr, they hint that some in the most conservative media have taken Mary as a banner of the Catholic Church and as a positive figure, upending, up to a point, the more unfavorable and sensationalist assessment that historiography and popular culture have created of her. By contrast, Losada, with his less

50 Pérez Martín, María Tudor. The book, which is one of the first examples of revisionist Marian historiography in Spain, was published in 2008. The article itself is dated June 2018. 51 “[D]erriba el muro de odio erigido contra María Tudor.” Vidal Arranz, “Reivindicando.” 52 “Bajo esa ley empezó una corta persecución a algunos protestantes, ni punto de comparación con la realizada por Enrique VIII ni, después de 1559, por Isabel I.” Fernández Barbadillo, “En socorro de una mártir,” and “María Tudor, sola en una isla.” 53 Losada, “La reina sanguinaria.”

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glowing assessment of the Marian persecutions, writes in El País, a leftcenter newspaper. And yet, for all its progressiveness, the portrait of Mary in El País is still mired in bizarrely misogynist views: Losada attributes Mary’s unforgiving stance toward the Protestants to her frustration at her inability to conceive children, an idea that is not explored in any other article, even though there are references to Mary’s false pregnancies in nine pieces. This most personal side of Mary’s life—as a woman trying to become a mother, as a wife to a man who did not love her, and as a queen who challenged her people in order to help her husband—is where she is perceived at her most vulnerable, and it is this that garners her some sympathy and Philip a certain amount of criticism.54 Love and politics were inescapably linked in Mary and Philip’s marriage: she risked her own position in England by choosing Philip as a husband, and later by granting him troops in his campaign against the French. And yet, only one of the articles mentions that this help was fundamental in the Spanish success at Saint-Quentin, one of Philip’s first resounding victories.55 The same piece blames Philip and his “thirst for conquest” for the loss of Calais that followed almost immediately afterwards, and quotes a desolate Mary saying “You will discover, when I am dead and cut open, that in my heart are Philip and Calais.”56 To add to that wound, the failure to conceive an heir was both a personal tragedy and a political blow for her, since England’s internal and international politics hinged on a successor. Two articles note that with his hopes of having an heir dashed, Philip was quick to see the advantages in marrying Elizabeth.57 This analysis has shown so far that the portrayal of Mary I is not as nuanced, nor as sympathetic as could be expected in a country with such strong historical ties with Mary, and where the Catholic faith that she championed was, and still is, the most common form of religious expression. The majority of the articles show what seems to be a deliberate effort to call attention to Mary without giving her a fair treatment, possibly 54 One author comments on the difficulty of writing an intimate profile of the queen without feeling compassion for her. Finanzas.com, “La reina estridente.” 55 J. B. “Felipe nunca la creyó.” 56 “[A]nsia de conquista”; “Descubriréis, cuando esté muerta y me abran, que en mi

corazón están Felipe y Calais.” In J. B. “Felipe II nunca la creyó.” This dramatic assertion is also included in episode 16 of the TV series Carlos, Rey Emperador. See analysis below. 57 See Losada, “La reina sanguinaria”; Cervera, “La traición.”

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because of the allure of the Bloody Mary myth. This demonstrates the lack of quality of the historical-journalistic research and its overreliance on outdated foreign perceptions that do not adequately represent Mary and her relationship with Spain.

Mary I on Television In recent years, Spanish audiences have witnessed a surge in the number of TV series revolving around some of the most important Spanish historical figures. Among them was Carlos, Rey Emperador (2015), an ambitious project that covers Charles V’s life from 1517 to his death in 1558. The series tries to portray a historically accurate rendition of all the complex scheming taking place in European courts, crucial in the imperial politics led by Charles. In episode 12, Henry VIII repudiates Catherine of Aragón and strips Mary of her rights as princess and heir.58 Henry, played by Alexander Brendemühl, is presented in a negative light, threatening to burn heretics and traitors; he is established as a tyrannical ruler, with a love for cruelty that has also been attributed to his daughter, “Bloody Mary.” And yet, the Mary in Carlos, Rey Emperador, played by Ángela Cremonte, is never portrayed in such terms: in all her scenes she is beautiful, dignified and captivating, and does not resemble the nasty character depicted in many of the Spanish newspaper articles. Her next appearance is in episode 16, when she is crowned Queen of England.59 The audience learns about her accession from the emperor’s point of view; Charles immediately considers whether she could bring England back into the Catholic fold, and how she could be of use for him against France. His counsellor Granvelle worries about Mary’s ability to conceive children at her age, and warns Charles against Elizabeth, “the most committed of Lutherans.”60 Although Mary’s age is a common topic in any piece about her—especially regarding the eleven-year gap between her and Philip—Carlos, Rey 58 Carlos, Rey Emperador, 12, “Los demonios,” directed by Joan Noguera, aired

November 23, 2015, on La 1 de Radiotelevisión Española, https://www.rtve.es/alacarta/ videos/carlos-rey-emperador/carlos-rey-emperador-capitulo-12/3372465/. 59 Carlos, Rey Emperador, 16, “Deseo de Ser Nadie,” directed by Jorge Torregrossa, aired January 25, 2016, on La 1 de Radiotelevisión Española, https://www.rtve.es/ala carta/videos/carlos-rey-emperador/carlos-rey-cap16/3455288/. 60 “La más convencida de las luteranas.”

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Emperador tiptoes around this fact, not giving her actual age and only providing some hints that she might be past child-bearing age. But here, Ángela Cremonte and Marcel Borrás (playing Philip) are young and much closer in age than Mary and Philip were, which renders the argument about her motherhood implausible from the perspective of a twenty-first century audience. In fact, there are no direct allusions to Philip’s rejection of Mary as a woman, something that is remarked upon in almost all the pieces written in Spain about Mary. However, the series very subtly intimates Philip’s possible lack of attraction toward his wife by making him peruse a book with pornographic engravings right before his first sexual encounter with Mary. Again, this might have been a very subtle allusion to Philip’s real-life lack of attraction toward Mary while avoiding a direct reference to Mary’s ugliness, which would be incongruous given the physical charm of the actress playing Mary in this series.61 While Carlos, Rey Emperador prided itself in the accuracy of its historical portrayals of characters and events, El Ministerio del Tiempo delights in anachronisms and in the limitless possibilities of a time that can be explored and changed at will. The characters’ constant back and forth between historical periods creates tensions within the narrative, usually to comical effects, like the use of modern-day slang or gadgets by historical characters like Philip IV or Diego Velázquez. The writers are often able to create powerful scenes where past and future coalesce and create a poignant clash between fate and what we understand as history, and it is at this intersection that the most recent portrait of Mary I in Spanish television can be analyzed. The first appearance of Mary in the episode sees her sitting in her room, waiting for news of her sister’s murder. The screenplay describes her as “sitting down, scrawny, aged,” and adds that Mary is 39 years old.62 Immediately afterwards, a scene at the Ministry of Time’s headquarters introduces the audience to some basic information about Mary, Elizabeth, and their time period, linking them to some of the events in the history of England (and Spain) most familiar to Spanish audiences, 61 Alexander Samson notes that Mary I is “the political and aesthetic equal of her husband,” in Carlos, Rey Emperador. Samson, Mary and Philip, 4. 62 “María I de Inglaterra (39), sentada, flaca, envejecida.” In Carolina González et al., Screenplay of “Bloody Mary Hour.” https://wcm-descargas.s3.eu-west-3.amazonaws. com/globomedia/MDT+4X03.pdf?fbclid=IwAR2yzyGgESDgdpbAkJ85nxdnY25KUK9DagYBD7piVLs0YYmdUhB6y9WIxA.

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like the “Armada Invencible.” In order to emphasize Elizabeth’s impact on the development of the cultural, political, and religious identity of England, other members of the Ministry refer to the substantial changes that England would have undergone had Elizabeth been murdered in 1554. But in this presentation, Mary is once again relegated: it is Elizabeth’s place in the history of Spain that prompts the Ministry’s mission to the Marian court, not Mary’s. When Jesús Méndez—portrayed by actor Hugo Silva—wonders why they have been asked to meddle in English affairs when the Ministry only takes care of “our history,” Ernesto Jiménez—the Ministry’s Chief Operations Officer—argues that Elizabeth was very much part of the history of Spain, reminding him pointedly of the Spanish Armada. The first thing that is mentioned about Mary is that she was, like her grandmother Isabella of Castile before her, “very, very Catholic […] but not one of those who turn the other cheek. She believed in an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.”63 This is the only time in her portrayals in the Spanish media that Mary’s Catholicism is characterized as something objectionable, and it is presented as the motivation for the Marian persecutions and the epithet “Bloody Mary,” which is used by one of the characters to complain about the bad reputation of the Spanish Inquisition. When the team from the Ministry of Time finally meets Mary, the first impression is unfavorable; the screenplay describes Mary as nasty, authoritarian, and contemptuous of the beauty of her new Spanish teacher, Irene de Larra (Cayetana Guillén-Cuervo). But soon a more nuanced portrayal emerges, with Irene serving almost as a sort of mentor: we see Mary interacting with Irene as she opens up in their new-found friendship, in scenes that humanize the queen for twenty-first century audiences. When they read the sexually-charged El libro del buen amor together, a new image of Mary arises, funny and playful, one that may be fictional but does much to ingratiate her to the public. However, the judgment of her politics is harsher, and the audience’s good will is offset by Mary’s unconcealed delight at the execution of some heretics. After this, Philip gets angry at her for being like her father, and demands she speaks in Spanish to him, invoking their shared ancestry. At the end of the episode, the realization of her false pregnancy and her own recognition of her loneliness draw up

63 “María [era] muy, muy católica […] Pero no de los que ponen la otra mejilla. Ella creía más en el ojo por ojo, diente por diente.” González et al., “Screenplay,” 8–9.

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the most tragic side of Mary, which rounds off her character and creates a complex, but still sympathetic picture of the queen. But perhaps the most significant feature of Mary’s characterization in this episode is her relationship with Philip. Where Carlos, Rey Emperador ignored the age difference and Philip’s rejection of Mary, here they are central plot points: the actress who plays Mary (Rachel Lascar) is twentyfour years older than the actor playing Philip II (Jorge Clemente). This wide age gap is not historically accurate, but it makes Philip’s rejection of Mary more believable, especially since the creators also go to extremes to turn the beautiful Lascar into the “ugly, scrawny, and aged” Mary of the screenplay. This Mary is around fifty years old, gaunt, and harsh, nothing like the youthful, beautiful queen in Carlos, Rey Emperador. It is no wonder that the much younger and attractive Philip is shown lamenting his fate and his duty to his father. Philip and his entourage cruelly abuse Mary, reiterating her ugliness several times and using the same terms that appear in real historical sources. The Duke of Alba (Jesús Noguero) quotes the infamous “it will take a great God to drink from this cup” line that has also been excerpted in multiple articles.64 Again, Philip is presented as the hero for fulfilling his role as Mary’s husband. “I cannot imagine a crueler battle,” asserts the Duke.65 When Philip announces his decision to leave England, Mary is prostrate in bed, depressed by his departure and by Irene’s absence. Philip’s commiseration is shared by the audience, and a final act of defiance against the misogyny and unfairness of history is performed by Irene, who claims that, instead of Bloody Mary, the famous cocktail could have been named “Bloody Henry, or Bloody… Torquemada,” in an allusion to their cruelty.66

Conclusion In “Bloody Mary Hour” the audience discovers a queen that, from the very title of the episode has been made to fit a physical and psychological portrayal defined centuries ago in the historical accounts of her reign 64 “Tal vez si usase los vestidos de nuestras mujeres, pues parecería mejor vieja y flaca […] aunque ha [sic] decir verdad, mucho Dios es menester para beber de este cáliz.” González et al., “Screenplay,” 22. 65 “No puedo imaginar batalla más cruel.” González et al., “Screenplay,” 22. 66 “También podrían haberse llamado Bloody Henry, o Bloody… Torquemada.”

González et al., “Screenplay,” 54.

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written in the heat of the religious controversy between Catholicism and Protestantism, and which has been perpetuated both in England and in Spain by historiography and popular culture. And yet, Irene’s final rant puts the positive and negative aspects of Mary’s life, albeit exaggerated and fictionalized, in perspective, both historically and morally. Whether it is enough to restore Mary’s image in the eyes of the Spanish public is yet to be seen. After all, and as Ernesto notes, “History is what it is.”67 Yet the slow but sure increase in interest in Mary in Spain, from books to newspaper articles to TV series, shows that she is being reclaimed as a figure worth exploring. It is difficult to explain why Mary is becoming an object of interest for academics and content creators (from journalists to screenplay writers) in Spain now. Perhaps a society that is slowly coming to terms with the unfairness with which it has historically treated women is a fertile ground for a revision of the image of “Bloody Mary,” although the articles and episodes analyzed in this chapter show authors in Spain still have to shake the influence of traditional English historiography. As long as the media keep ignoring the new wave of historiography that is bringing the image of Mary into a new light, the same clichés will continue to be reproduced. In this regard, TV series such as El Ministerio del Tiempo or Carlos, Rey Emperador could do much for Mary’s reinstatement. Their influence is not limited to their impact as popular culture artifacts, or to the fascination they elicit for the history of Spain, but perhaps to a mix of both characteristics; it is their allure as an entertainment product that establishes a connection with the public to become an actual source of historical education. The images they create are enduring, leaving an impression on the public that immortalizes both the historical truth and the myth, and it is at this intersection of history, morality, and legend that the figure of Mary I, Queen of England and Spain, needs to be reclaimed and reevaluated.

67 “La Historia es la que es.” González et al., “Screenplay,” 54.

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Bibliography Alonso, R. “María I de Inglaterra: ¿Fue tan cruel y sanguinaria como la pinta la Leyenda Negra?” ABC, November 2, 2018. https://www.abc.es/historia/ abci-maria-inglaterra-cruel-y-sanguinaria-como-pinta-leyenda-negra-201811 010208_noticia.html. Arranz, Vidal. “Reivindicando el honor de María Tudor.” El Norte de Castilla, June 18, 2018. https://www.elnortedecastilla.es/culturas/reivindic ando-honor-maria-20180618123432-nt.html. B., D. “María Tudor, la asesina de protestantes que avivó la Leyenda Negra española.” El Español, October 29, 2018. https://www.elespanol.com/cul tura/historia/20181029/protestantes-culpable-maria-sanguinaria-leyendanegra-espanola/349215383_0.html. B., J. “Felipe nunca la creyó: así fue el trágico embarazo psicológico de María Tudor.” El Español, February 21, 2020. https://www.elespanol.com/cul tura/historia/20200221/felipe-ii-tragico-embarazo-psicologico-maria-tudor/ 466454215_0.html. Calderón, Mónica. “La simpática, la enamorada y la puta: Las mujeres de Felipe II.” rtve.es, January 25, 2016. https://www.rtve.es/television/20160125/ mujeres-felipe-ii-maria-tudor-maria-manuela-portugal-isabel-osorio-puta-delrey/1288004.shtml. Carlos, Rey Emperador. 12, “Los demonios.” Directed by Joan Noguera. Aired November 23, 2015, on La 1 de Radiotelevisión Española. https://www. rtve.es/alacarta/videos/carlos-rey-emperador/carlos-rey-emperador-capitulo12/3372465/. Carlos, Rey Emperador. 16, “Deseo de Ser Nadie.” Directed by Jorge Torregrossa. Aired January 25, 2016, on La 1 de Radiotelevisión Española. https://www.rtve.es/alacarta/videos/carlos-rey-emperador/carlosrey-cap16/3455288/. “Carta en la cual se da Relación de lo que ha pasado en el reino de Inglaterra después que el Príncipe Don Felipe entró en él.” In Viaje de Felipe II à Inglaterra . . . y relaciones varias relativas al mismo suceso, edited by Pascual de Gayangos, 105–14. Madrid: Sociedad de bibliófilos españoles, 1867. Cervera, César. “La traición más cruel de Felipe II hacia su esposa inglesa María ‘la sanguinaria’.” ABC, October 17, 2018. https://www.abc.es/historia/ abci-traicion-mas-cruel-felipe-hacia-esposa-inglesa-maria-sanguinaria-201810 160247_noticia.html. Concostrina, Nieves. “Felipe II, el rey que viajó a Inglaterra para casarse de mala gana con su tía segunda.” Acontece que no es poco, Cadena SER, July 6, 2017. Audio, 3:13. https://cadenaser.com/programa/2017/07/06/la_ven tana/1499366729_453814.html.

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de Ocampo, Florián. Noticias de varios sucesos acaecidos, desde el año de 1521 hasta el 1558; copiadas de un códice escrito de mano de Florián de Ocampo. Vol. II. Madrid: Biblioteca Nacional de España, MS 9937. de Ribadeneyra, Pedro. Historia Eclesiástica del cisma de Inglaterra. Madrid: Imprenta y Librería de D. Manuel Martín, 1781. Doran, Susan, and Thomas Freeman, eds. Mary Tudor: Old and New Perspectives. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Duncan, Sarah, and Valerie Schutte, eds. The Birth of a Queen: Essays on the Quincentenary of Mary I . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Editorial office. “Descubre a la ‘sangrienta’ María Tudor.” El Correo de España, December 11, 2014. https://elcorreodeespana.com/politica/50892569/des cubre-a-la-sangrienta-maria-tudor.html. Edwards, John. Mary I: The Daughter of Time. London: Allen Lane, 2016. El Ministerio del Tiempo. Season 4, episode 3 “Bloody Mary Hour.” Directed by Catxo López. Aired May 19, 2020, on La 1 de Radiotelevisión Española. https://www.rtve.es/alacarta/videos/el-ministerio-del-tiempo/ministeriodel-tiempo-temporada-4-capitulo-3-bloody-mary-hour/5577441/. “Enrique VIII: la brutalidad anticatólica del rey decapitador de esposas sale de nuevo a la luz.” ABC, May 6, 2018. https://www.abc.es/historia/abci-enr ique-viii-brutalidad-anticatolica-decapitador-esposas-sale-nuevo-201805060 936_noticia.html. Fernández Barbadillo, Pedro. “En socorro de una mártir: María Tudor.” Libertad Digital, August 14, 2010. https://www.libertaddigital.com/opinion/pedrofernandez-barbadillo/en-socorro-de-una-martir-maria-tudor-65238/. ———. “María Tudor, sola en una isla.” Perfiles reales, ES Radio, September 22, 2018. Audio, 4:50. https://esradio.libertaddigital.com/fonoteca/201809-22/perfiles-reales-maria-tudor-sola-en-una-isla-128483.html. Finanzas.com. “María Tudor: la reina estridente.” Accessed December 28, 2020. https://www.finanzas.com/hemeroteca/maria-tudor-la-reina-est ridente_13883805_102.html. Gómez de Silva, Rui. “Rui Gómez de Silva to Francisco de Eraso, 27 July 1554.” In Calendar of State Papers, Spain, Volume 13, 1554–1558, edited by Royall Tyler, 1–13. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1954. http://www.bri tish-history.ac.uk/cal-state-papers/spain/vol13/pp1-13. ———. “Rui Gómez de Silva to Francisco de Eraso, 29 July 1554.” In Calendar of State Papers, Spain, Volume 13, 1554–1558, edited by Royall Tyler, 1–13. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1954. http://www.british-history. ac.uk/cal-state-papers/spain/vol13/pp1-13. González, Carolina, Jordi Calafí, Isa Sánchez, and Javier Olivares. Screenplay of “Bloody Mary Hour.” https://wcm-descargas.s3.eu-west-3.amazonaws. com/globomedia/MDT+4X03.pdf?fbclid=IwAR2yzyGgESDgdpbAkJ85nx dnY25KUK9-DagYBD7piVLs0YYmdUhB6y9WIxA.

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Kamen, Henry. Empire: How Spain Became a World Power, 1492–1763. New York: HarperCollins, 2003. Losada, Juan Carlos. “La reina sanguinaria.” El País, June 16, 2005. https:// elpais.com/diario/2005/10/16/eps/1129444015_850215.html. Maltby, William S. The Rise and Fall of the Spanish Empire. New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. “María Tudor, la reina borde y odiada.” ABC, July 28, 2018. https://www.abc. es/historia/abci-maria-tudor-reina-borde-y-odiada-201807281535_video. html. Martínez Monfort, Susana. “El Reino Unido celebra el 500 aniversario del nacimiento de María Tudor.” El Periódico de Aragón, February 18, 2016. https://www.elperiodicodearagon.com/noticias/aragon/reino-unidocelebra-500-aniversario-nacimiento-maria-tudor_1089097.html. Muñoz, Andrés. “Viaje de Felipe II à Inglaterra.” In Viaje de Felipe II à Inglaterra . . . y relaciones varias relativas al mismo suceso, edited by Pascual de Gayangos, 1–85. Madrid: Sociedad de bibliófilos españoles, 1867. Parrill, Sue, and William B. Robinson. The Tudors on Film and Television. Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland & Company, 2013. Pérez, Joseph. “María Tudor o ‘Bloody Mary’: una reina Inglesa para Felipe II.” El Mundo, February 18, 2016. https://www.elmundo.es/la-aventura-de-lahistoria/2016/02/18/56c5993746163f20168b4660.html. Pérez Martín, Mª Jesús. María Tudor, la gran reina desconocida. Madrid: Rialp, 2008. “Relación muy verdadera de las rebelliones que ha auido en el Reyno de Inglaterra.” In José Solís de Santos, “Relaciones de sucesos de Inglaterra en el reinado de Carlos V.” In Testigo del tiempo, memoria del universo: cultura y escrita y sociedad en el mundo ibérico (siglos XV-XVIII), edited by Manual Fernández, Carlos-Alberto González Sánchez, and Natalia Millard Álvarez, 677–81. Barcelona: Publicaciones de l’abadia de Montserrat, 2009. Robinson, William B. “Stripped of Their Altars: Film, Faith, and Tudor Royal Women from the Silent Era to the Twenty-First Century, 1895–2014.” In Women during the English Reformations, edited by J. A. Chappell and K. A. Kramer, 154–78. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. ———. “Marrying Mary to the Black Legend: Anti-Catholicism and Anti-Marian Messages in Anglo-American Films about Philip II of Spain.” In The Birth of a Queen: Essays on the Quincentenary of Mary I , edited by Sarah Duncan and Valerie Schutte, 233–54. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Samson, Alexander. Mary and Philip: The Marriage of Tudor England and Habsburg Spain. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020. Van den Brule, Álvaro. “El matrimonio entre ‘La reina sangrienta’ y ‘El rey prudente’: Felipe II y María Tudor.” El Confidencial, April 13, 2019. https://www.elconfidencial.com/alma-corazon-vida/2019-04-13/unmatrimonio-breve-felipe-ii-maria-tudor_1938142/.

Fact or Fiction

Dressed to Kill: The Fashioning of “Bloody Mary” Emilie M. Brinkman

Dress is one of the most striking and meaningful features of Shekhar Kapur’s film Elizabeth (1998).1 Indeed, the film is certainly a feast for the eyes, having earned multiple award nominations for costume design and even an Oscar for achievement in cosmetics and hairstyling. Costume is particularly significant in the movie’s first several scenes, which take place during the reign of Elizabeth’s half-sister Mary. The film begins with the burning of three Protestant heretics, one of whom is Bishop Nicholas Ridley while another is, presumably, Hugh Latimer. They wear simple white shifts, their freshly shaved heads still bleeding as they plead for onlookers to help them as they “burn too slowly.” The crowd mercifully obliges by attempting to toss more wood onto the fire while mounted 1 Kapur’s Elizabeth remains one of the most popular recent depictions of Elizabeth I and has been extensively studied in respect to its treatment of the titular monarch, her court and the political and cultural landscape of sixteenth-century England. See Bethany Latham, Elizabeth I in Film and Television: A Study of the Major Portrayals (London: McFarland & Company, 2011).

E. M. Brinkman (B) Crestview Hills, KY, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 V. Schutte and J. S. Hower (eds.), Writing Mary I, Queenship and Power, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95132-0_8

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guards dressed in morions, helmets most often associated with the Spanish conquistadors, attempt to disperse them in response.2 Viewers are first introduced to Mary, the architect of the atrocity, in the following scene. She is seated next to her husband, Philip II of Spain, in a Gothic chamber shrouded in darkness as members of her inner circle learn of her (phantom) pregnancy. Mary dons a black gown, embellished with her famed pearl, while her courtiers and husband are also dressed in dark garb. Even Mary’s dwarf mirrors the queen in dress, as was the custom in early modern Europe for dwarves to often serve as fashionable accessories to royalty, especially in portraiture.3 The textiles that adorn the space further contribute to this dark and depressing aesthetic. In the chamber, black drapes block out the sunlight while a wall tapestry, shown in a subsequent scene, depicts a rather grotesque baby Jesus suckling at

2 The morion is a military helmet that originated in the Spanish kingdom of Castile. In fact, the term morion translates simply as “helmet” or “headpiece” in Spanish. The style is a form of kettle hat, or wide-brimmed helmet, with a comb added to the bowl and the brim curved upwards in both the front and back. By the mid sixteenth century, the morion, and other variations such as the cabasset, were widely used by foot soldiers of the Spanish Empire, as well as other European nations. They are still worn today by members of the Vatican’s Swiss Guard. The morion has also achieved lasting popularity in modern popular culture as they are frequently worn in historical and period pieces set during the Renaissance, including multiple Tudor films and television series. It is no coincidence that this style of helmet was utilized in here Kapur’s film for Mary’s royal guards. See Harold Leslie Peterson, Arms and Armor in Colonial America, 1526–1783 (New York: Dover Publications, 2000), 113–114. 3 Dwarfs were an important facet of royal representation in early modern courts and

were usually featured next to a monarch in order to accentuate the ruler’s majesty and literal greatness; the height difference was used to visually emphasize the monarch’s position of power by making them look physically greater. Dwarfs appeared alongside monarchs in-person, at banquets, ceremonies and such, as well as portraiture, as in Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656). Since dwarfs also often served as a substitute for children, the dwarf’s presence in Kapur’s film is even more significant considering Mary’s inability to bear children, another visual reminder of her failure to produce an heir. For more on dwarfs in the courts of early modern Europe, see Janet Ravenscroft, “Dwarfs—and a Loca—as Ladies’ Maids at the Spanish Habsburg Courts,” in The Politics of Female Households: Ladies-in-Waiting across Early Modern Europe, eds. Nadine Akkerman and Birgit Houben (Boston: Brill, 2014); Pamela Allen Brown, “The Mirror and the Cage: Queens and Dwarfs at the Early Modern Court,” in Historical Affects and the Early Modern Theater, eds. Ronda Arab, Michelle Dowd, and Adam Zucker (New York: Routledge, 2015); and Christopher William Wells, “‘Court ‘Monsters’: Deformity in the Western European Royal Courts between 1500 and 1700,” Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural, 7, no. 2 (2018): 182–214.

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the breast of the Virgin Mary. In addition, several statues of the Virgin and Child also adorn the stone chamber. In contrast to this image of Mary and her royal court, the viewer first glimpses the youthful Elizabeth in the scene immediately following. The viewer is pulled out of the darkness in this scene as Elizabeth, accompanied by her loyal and colorfully clad ladies, dances in the sunny countryside. Elizabeth’s gown is of rich velvet and silk and in a bright Tudor green shade. The sleeves of her chemise are embroidered with strawberries, a traditional English design symbolizing purity or oftentimes fertility and rebirth. While Mary also appears in a green dress in a subsequent scene opposite Elizabeth, the shade is much darker, almost black, as if to sartorially symbolize how Mary’s bloom, in both a figurative and literal sense (in terms of her fertility), has faded just as Elizabeth blossoms. Here, fashion serves as a mode to visually juxtapose the sisters. The youthful Elizabeth represents the bright and promising future of England. In sharp contrast, Mary is depicted as old, violent, intolerant, tyrannical, hysterical, and even mentally unstable, a religious fanatic guided by her Spanish advisors and living in an antiquated court. As Bethany Latham notes, the palace’s historically inaccurate Gothic architecture symbolizes “a literal step back to the Dark Ages.”4 Mary’s dress and apartments reflect a return to darkness and popish superstition under her rule without the illumination of Protestantism. Kapur’s rendering here embodies the stereotypical image of Queen Mary I as “Bloody Mary,” the tyrannical papist queen who persecuted and murdered over three hundred Protestant martyrs during her short five-year reign. The image of “Bloody Mary,” which has dominated both scholarship and popular culture for centuries, is certainly an exaggerated and fictitious characterization of the historical Mary Tudor, based on both real and perceived negative aspects of her life, personality, and queenship.5 Costume plays an important role in the construction of any character, and 4 Latham, Elizabeth I in Film and Television, 150. 5 The image of “Bloody Mary” has been reexamined during the last several decades.

One of the most influential works of this revisionist scholarship is Susan Doran and Thomas Freeman’s anthology. Several essays in this volume analyze the film’s image of Elizabeth and the contrast to Mary. Yet, Mary is only studied in relation to her sister, not unsurprising considering the absence of any film or television series focused solely on the life and reign of Mary Tudor. Indeed, Mary is usually only even portrayed in contrast to her sister, as a dark foil to Elizabeth. See Susan Doran and Thomas Freeman, eds., Mary Tudor: Old and New Perspectives (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

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that remains particularly true of “Bloody Mary.” Indeed, fashion was, and still remains, a fundamental aspect of religious, political, and historical identity, and it has likewise contributed to this enduring sobriquet. As Thomas Freeman has demonstrated, the origins of the “Bloody Mary” myth can be traced back to the seventeenth century, when xenophobia and fears regarding popery colored much of Stuart politics.6 National sentiment also began to be integrally tied to fashion and dress. While characteristics of different styles of dress began to be sharply defined, cultural exchange and syncretism increased as well.7 It is at this time that fashion begins to contribute to the trope of “Bloody Mary,” when authors, writers, and playwrights began to emphasize her foreignness and devotion to Catholicism through her dress. Such portrayals initially functioned in the seventeenth century as political devices meant to visually represent her failure as a queen, namely her disastrous religious policies and inability to bear an heir, and, especially, her enduring loyalty to Spain. In many of these cultural productions, Mary’s identity as a Catholic queen is emphasized through her clothing, specifically with opulent and heavily embellished attire, representative of popish vice and excess. In others, she is attired in black garb, identifying her as Spanish and/or Catholic, not English. As the “Bloody Mary” sobriquet continued to evolve in the following centuries, so did Mary’s sartorial style within popular imagination. She is usually depicted unflatteringly as a reminder of her unfitness to rule, often as an old spinster in black (as in Kapur’s film) or worse, a wicked queen garbed in red, as if the blood of her victims has forever stained her clothes. By the late nineteenth century, the association of Mary and blood was firmly established in her (red) dress. Yet, the reality of Mary’s wardrobe was far more complicated than these images suggest. This essay examines the role of dress and costume in the fashioning of Mary I’s historical and popular image. I first explore Mary’s apparel during her lifetime, and then analyze her posthumous wardrobe on stage and screen in several major works from the seventeenth century to the present. Such posthumous sartorial depictions of 6 Thomas Freeman, “Inventing Bloody Mary: Perceptions of Mary Tudor from the Restoration to the Twentieth Century,” in Mary Tudor: Old and New Perspectives, eds. Susan Doran and Thomas Freeman (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 7 Carmen Bernis and Amalia Descalzo, “Spanish Female Dress in the Habsburg Period,” in Spanish Fashion at the Courts of Early Modern Europe, eds. José Luis Colomer and Amalia Descalzo (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica, 2014), 39.

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Mary do not accurately reflect what she actually favored and wore. While Mary did often don black and Iberian styles, she did not do so exclusively. Even after her marriage to Philip, she did not maintain a slavish devotion to Spanish dress. In fact, contemporary sources, including eyewitness accounts, wardrobe records, and portraiture, reveal that Mary’s fashion tastes were far more nuanced than previously supposed, as she often wore French fashions and rich colors. Consequently, I argue that certain fashion tropes, that is, Hispanicized, Catholicized, opulent attire, black clothing, and red dress, have been utilized in popular culture to propagate her image as “Bloody Mary.” There remains a large gap within current early modern scholarship concerning Mary I’s wardrobe as well as Marian fashion more generally. Studies of Tudor fashion and dress have tended to focus almost exclusively upon the court of her father Henry VIII or Elizabeth I. Maria Hayward has extensively examined dress and sumptuary legislation during Henry’s reign, revealing how absolutely central clothing was to the fabric of court life as well as to the king’s royal image.8 Janet Arnold has provided an exhaustive pictorial and textual inventory of Elizabeth I’s wardrobe, while Eleri Lynn has also produced impressive studies of Tudor fashion and, most recently, textiles.9 In contrast, Mary’s wardrobe has only received cursory attention, and usually in conjunction with the other Tudor monarchs. Such an oversight could be due in great part to the brevity of her five-year reign, especially in comparison to the forty-five years her sister sat on the throne. Another possible explanation could also be based on the false assumption that her wardrobe was not particularly noteworthy. Indeed, Elizabeth I has maintained a reputation among both scholars and modern Anglophiles as one of the fashionistas of the Renaissance. Such a designation is certainly not without merit. A comprehensive examination of her Wardrobe accounts reveals that she owned thousands of gowns and hundreds of jewelry pieces at any given time.10 Yet, Mary

8 See Maria Hayward, Dress at the Court of King Henry VIII (New York: Routledge, 2007); Maria Hayward, Rich Apparel: Clothing and the Law in Henry VIII’s England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009); and Maria Hayward and Philip Ward, eds., The Inventory of King Henry VIII: Textiles and Dress (London: Harvey Miller for the Antiquaries, 2012). 9 Janet Arnold, Queen Elizabeth’s Wardrobe Unlock’d (Leeds: W. S. Maney and Son Ltd, 1988); Eleri Lynn, Tudor Fashion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017); and Eleri Lynn, Tudor Textiles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020). 10 See Arnold, Queen Elizabeth’s Wardrobe Unlock’d.

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also enjoyed fashion and dress and had her own impressive collection of gowns, jewels, and accessories. There are several excellent master’s and doctoral theses that address Mary’s wardrobe, what she wore, and Great Wardrobe, the department of the royal household responsible for the provisioning, creation, maintenance, and storage of royal clothing and interior furnishings. Alison Carter first examined Mary’s clothes in the 1980s and outlined her fashion choices before and after her accession, being one of the first scholars to note her taste for French styles.11 Bethany Pleydell’s dissertation explores the legacy of Spanish styles upon English fashion and culture more broadly as a result of Mary’s marriage to Philip, while Hilary Doda has effectively demonstrated the absolute importance of dress and the royal wardrobe to the formation of Mary’s royal identity.12 However, there has yet to be a study which analyzes the wardrobes of both the historical Mary Tudor and mythical “Bloody Mary.” My essay here seeks to fill that gap by analyzing the two in concert, thereby demonstrating the power of fashion and dress in the construction of popular historical imagery. Although Mary was not the desired male heir, she was, nonetheless, much loved as a young child. The king frequently treated her with great affection and, as Judith Richards contends, perhaps even indulgence.13 From her infancy, she was treated with all the pomp and ceremony that was afforded to a princess. As her nursery transitioned into a more princely household by 1519, her staff grew to an impressive size and her apartments were dressed in rich gold and velvet furnishings.14 Moreover, her wardrobe also reflected her royal status. She was always sumptuously attired for state occasions and court festivities, especially during periods 11 Alison J. Carter, “Mary Tudor’s Wardrobe of Robes: Documentary and Visual

Evidence of Mary’s Dress Style As Princess, 1516–1553, and As Mary I, Queen of England, 1553–1558” (MA thesis, University of London, Courtauld Institute of Art, 1982). 12 Bethany Helen Pleydell, “The Spanish Tudors: Fashioning the Anglo-Spanish Elite through Dress, c. 1554–1603, and beyond” (PhD diss., University of Bristol, 2018); and Hilary Doda, “Of Crymsen Tissue: The Construction of a Queen. Identity, Legitimacy and the Wardrobe of Mary Tudor” (MA thesis, Dalhousie University, Halifax, 2011). See also Hilary Doda, “Lady Mary to Queen of England: Transformation, Ritual, and the Wardrobe of the Robes,” in The Birth of a Queen: Essays on the Quincentenary of Mary I , eds. Sarah Duncan and Valerie Schutte (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). 13 Judith M. Richards, Mary Tudor (New York: Routledge, 2008), 34. 14 Richards, Mary Tudor, 35.

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of marital negotiations. Indeed, it was important from an early age that she dresses to impress. Sartorial references to Mary’s Catholic faith and Spanish sympathies can be traced back to her childhood. Even the earliest surviving miniature portrait of Mary reflects her loyalties to Spain.15 The miniature is attributed to Lucas Horenbout (1490–1544), a Flemish portraitist who was formally granted the office of the “King’s Painter” in 1534 and who would later become the highest-paid artist at Henry’s court.16 The portrait depicts a young Princess Mary, dressed in a black gown and wearing a pearl-embellished French hood. Strands of matching pearls and a gold cross adorn her neck. Yet, her most striking accessory is what appears to be a brooch fastened on her bodice. The gold brooch, richly bordered with pearls, bears the inscription “The Empour” (meaning “The Emperor”), a clear reference to Mary’s then engagement to her maternal cousin Charles V, King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor, from 1521– 1525.17 It is unclear whether such a brooch was actually among Princess Mary’s collection of jewels. As Charlotte Bolland notes, jewelry was often exchanged between prospective brides and husbands in early modern Europe, and there are certainly accounts of Mary and Charles exchanging gifts of jewels on the occasion of their betrothal in 1522. However, it is also likely that such an adornment was artistic invention.18 Regardless, the pointed inclusion of the inscription was no doubt intended to sartorially emphasize Mary’s status as the future wife of the Emperor as well as England’s alliance with the powerful House of Hapsburg. Moreover, her black dress, the signature shade of the Hapsburg court, may also be interpreted as another nod toward the union. While Mary and Charles

15 Lucas Horenbout, Queen Mary I , c. 1525, watercolour on vellum, 1 3/8 in. (35 mm), London, The National Portrait Gallery. 16 Charlotte Bolland, Tudor & Jacobean Portraits (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2018), 142. 17 Mary and Charles were formally betrothed in 1521 but Charles ended the engagement in 1525 in order to marry Isabella of Portugal. Horenbout’s first documented presence in England can be traced to the royal household accounts in 1525. Consequently, it is likely that the miniature portrait was painted c. 1525, when Mary was about 9 nine years old. 18 Bolland, Tudor & Jacobean Portraits, 142.

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never married, she did ultimately wed her former suitor’s son, Philip, in 1554, thus solidifying an Anglo-Spanish alliance.19 Yet, her wardrobe was severely trimmed when Henry began seeking his annulment from Catherine. Many of her gowns and all her jewels were taken away from her after her parents’ marriage was declared invalid in 1533, a consequence of her demotion from princess to “Lady Mary” as well as a likely punishment for her continued loyalty to her mother, now “Dowager Princess of Wales.” A year later, in February 1534, Eustace Chapuys reported to his master Charles V that Mary, “finding herself almost without articles of clothing, has just been obliged to send a gentleman to the King, her father, begging him to provide her with the necessary articles.” Chapuys continued: “The gentleman had orders from her to take any money or clothes that might be given to him, but accept no cheque or order in which her name should appear without the title of Princess.”20 Chapuys’s report reveals that while clothing was important to Mary, so too was the acknowledgment of her rightful position and title, perhaps even more so if the intention was to reject the much-needed articles if she was not correctly addressed. After Anne Boleyn’s execution, Mary subsequently returned to royal favor when she signed the Oath of Supremacy, but her wardrobe often remained quite limited into her early adulthood. Household records reveal that she took great care and expense to mend her clothing. She clearly understood the value, both material and symbolic, of her dresses. However, the king did frequently augment her wardrobe with more elaborate gowns, as he did when she was a child, during periods of renewed marriage negotiations well into her twenties. Fashion was particularly important to Mary’s image during her reign, as well as after her death. Like other early modern monarchs, the queen drew upon the power of representation and self-fashioning in the construction of her royal image.21 Thus, clothing and other material objects often functioned as political tools, appropriated to convey 19 See Alexander Samson, Mary and Philip: The Marriage of Tudor England and

Habsburg Spain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020). 20 “Spain: February 1534, 21–28,” in Calendar of State Papers, Spain, Volume 5 Part 1, 1534–1535, ed. Pascual de Gayangos (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1886), 53–70. 21 See Carole Levin, The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power (1994; repr., Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013);

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certain messages and images. Mary understood, as did her grandfather, father, and half-siblings, that it was imperative to convey an image of royal authority in order to visually legitimize the Tudor dynasty’s right to rule. After all, Mary was only two generations removed from the civil wars that won her family the English crown in 1485. Mary’s tangible need to broadcast her queenly majesty was no doubt due in great part to the issue surrounding her own legitimacy as Henry’s daughter, and subsequent problems it caused regarding the succession. To Mary, she was indeed born out of her father’s true and legal marriage to her mother, Queen Catherine. In the premodern era, clothing reflected one’s station and there was certainly an inherent hierarchy to dress, as regulated through sumptuary legislation. Yet, I argue that rich and expensive clothing, to some degree, held great personal and unique meaning to Mary from an early age. Mary’s great expenditure on clothing as queen was surely a form of compensation for all that she had been denied during her earlier years. Indeed, in the first two years of her five-year reign, Mary had spent a staggering £18,000 on her wardrobe.22 Evidence gathered from wardrobe accounts, letters, and portraiture, all reveal that Mary had a prevailing preference for French style-gowns, a taste that began at an early age and continued well into her reign. These dresses were form-fitting and could be worn with or without partlets, high-neck insert intended to cover a low décolletage.23 Data collected by Hilary Doda from royal household records reveals that between the years 1542–1558, Mary ordered 23 French dresses and only 1 Spanish-style gown in 1558. She also purchased 2 Italian, 3 “turkey” (Turkish), and 1 Dutch dress. The Spanish gown, which was requisitioned in April 1557, was likely the gown that figures in her 1557 portrait and is described in her warrants as: “a Spanish gowne of blacke vellvett bordered with buckram, the upper sleeves lined with frieze, and a stay if white fustian and bagges of blacke sateen.”24

and Kevin Sharpe, Selling the Tudor Monarchy: Authority and Image in Sixteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). 22 David Loades, The Tudor Court (Bangor: Headstart History, 1986), 82. 23 Valerie Cumming, C.W. Cunnington, and P.E. Cunnington, The Dictionary of

Fashion History (New York: Berg, 2010), 197. 24 Doda, “Of Crymsen Tissue,” 97.

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In addition, Mary also favored hoods in the French style, an interesting and frankly surprising fashion choice considering the implicit politicization of female headdresses within Henry VIII’s court during the 1530s and 1540s. There were, primarily, two different styles of hoods worn in Tudor England: the gable or “English” hood and the French hood. Both styles were stiff-framed and multi-layered, containing several components. The gable hood was a headdress with a pointed arch over the forehead and decorative side panels or flaps known as lappets, which framed the wearer’s face. Although the term “gable” was originally used since the angular shape resembled the gable roof of a house, the style was also widely referred to as the “English hood” due to its popularity throughout early modern England. The gable hood was considered a rather conservative style, as the hair was completely covered. In contrast, the French hood was worn near the back of the head with a rounded or oval band at the front, which was usually covered by another ornamental band referred to as a biliment or habiliment.25 One specific style, which figured prominently in Marian portraiture, was flattened across the head, projected wide at the temple, and then covered the ears at an angle.26 The origins of the French hood can be traced back to Anne of Brittany (1477–1514). In her 1516 portrait by Jan Gossaert, Mary Tudor, the youngest sister of Henry VIII, is depicted alongside her second husband, Charles Brandon 1st Duke of Suffolk, in a heavily embellished French hood. However, the French hood is most iconically associated with Anne Boleyn, who had accompanied the king’s sister to France when she wed Louis XII in 1514. Anne, who was a forerunner of French fashion at the English royal court, famously donned the French hood, which sharply clashed with the gable hoods worn by Catherine of Aragon and later Jane Seymour. Yet, most extant contemporary (and even later) portraits of Mary portray her in French hoods. She even dons the French style in her double portrait with Philip by Lucas de Heere.27 Wardrobe accounts also reveal that she frequently ordered French hoods. In terms of color, Mary’s sartorial preferences are also noteworthy. Color held particular cultural and political significance in premodern

25 Lynn, Tudor Fashion, 173. 26 Cumming, The Dictionary of Fashion History, 115. 27 Lucas de Heere, Mary I of England and Philip II of Spain, c.1534–1584, oil on

canvas, 106.1 × 77.4 cm, National Maritime Museum, London.

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England, particularly with respect to identity.28 Bright and bold colors were a defining feature of court fashion during the early Tudor period, specifically during the reign of Henry VIII. Even the royal livery was in the vibrant, signature Tudor shades of green and white. Such color sharply clashed with the dark, somber aesthetic characteristic of the Spanish court. Beginning in the sixteenth century, the Spanish Hapsburgs developed a signature royal uniform that was almost exclusively dark in shade. By the seventeenth century, black became emblematic of the Hapsburgs and the Spanish royal court.29 Mary’s dresses, statistically, tended toward a darker palette. Records from 1531–1557, reveal that Mary ordered multiple dresses in differing shades of red: russet (a dark brown color), carnation (a shade “resembling raw flesh”), murrey (a purplish-red), and rich crimson.30 Red was an especially popular shade at her father’s court, as the color was firmly associated with royal authority and power, wealth and parliamentary authority.31 Mary also purchased 1 blue gown as well as 1 white and 2 silver dresses. Fifteen purple dresses were also requisitioned, a suitable color considering its clear associations with royalty, as well as 38 black gowns.32 Mary’s donning of darker shades, as with French hoods, was most likely a personal choice as the English royal court tended to gravitate toward brighter shades even into the reign of Edward VI. Mary certainly developed a unique signature style of French-cut gowns in characteristically Spanish shades. Yet, her preference for and frequent donning of darker clothing would greatly contribute to her Catholicized and Hispanicized image during the seventeenth century, when the image of “Bloody Mary” began to develop.

28 Adrian Ailes, “Heraldry in Medieval England: Symbols of Politics and Propaganda,” in Heraldry, Pageantry and Social Display in Medieval England, ed. Peter R. Coss (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2002), 83. 29 José Luis Colomer, “Black and the Royal Image,” in Spanish Fashion at the Courts of Early Modern Europe, eds. José Luis Colomer and Amalia Descalzo (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica, 2014), 77. 30 Doda, “Of Crymsen Tissue,” 38; and Cumming, The Dictionary of Fashion History,

357. 31 See Maria Hayward, “Crimson, Scarlet, Murrey and Carnation: Red at the Court of Henry VIII,” Textile History, 38 (November 2007): 135–150. 32 Doda, “Of Crymsen Tissue,” 38.

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The sartorial connection between Mary and Catholicism, specifically, became more pronounced throughout the Stuart era, as fears of popery exploded after the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. Indeed, the image of Mary was frequently utilized as a warning of the dangers of a Catholic monarch on the English throne. The character of Mary Tudor appears in two early seventeenth-century plays, John Webster and Thomas Dekker’s Sir Thomas Wyatt and Thomas Heywood’s If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody. Webster and Dekker’s work was most likely first performed in 1602 and published five years later (1607). Although Mary appears in only two scenes throughout the play, she remains a central character and her costume makes a significant impact. As David Carnegie notes, Webster understood the importance of dress when portraying renowned royal and noble personages, especially in the context of sumptuary legislation, and thus he paid careful attention to both the literal and symbolic use of costume in his dramatic works.33 Mary first appears in the play in Act III with, according to the stage direction, “a Prayer booke in her hand, like a Nun.”34 To dress Mary as a nun with the accessory of the prayer book, clearly, as Teresa Grant states, “identifies her as Catholic, and an audience would draw the correct critical conclusion from that in itself.”35 Mary’s identity as “the catholicke Queene” is thus established from the moment she steps onto the stage at the opening of the third scene in Act III (I.iii.20). The rest of her ensemble is most probably a black or dark gown, in order to complete the appearance of a novice. At this critical moment in the play, as Lady Jane Grey and Guildford prepare for their coronation after the death of Edward, Mary, unaware of her brother’s death, wallows: Thus like a Nun, not like a Princesse borne, Descended from the Royall Henries loynes. Live I invironed in a house of stone: My Brother Edward lives in pompe and state, I in a mansion here all ruinate. Their rich attire, delicious banqueting: 33 John Webster, D.C. Gunby, David Carnegie, and MacDonald P. Jackson, The Works of John Webster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 17. 34 Webster, The Works of John Webster, 51. 35 Teresa Grant, “Dramatic Representations of Mary Tudor in the Early Years of the

Seventeenth Century,” in Mary Tudor: Old and New Perspectives, eds. Susan Doran and Thomas Freeman (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 68.

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Their severall pleasures, all their pride and honour, I have forsaken for a rich prayer Booke. The Golden Mines of wealthy India, Is all as drosse compared to thy sweetnesse. Thou art the joy, and comfort of the poore, The everlasting blisse in thee we finde. This little volume inclosed in this hand, Is richer then the Empire of this land. (I.iii.1–14)

Mary fashions a visual image of modest piety while verbally claiming to reject the vanities of the royal court for the simple pleasures of her Catholic missal. She paints a rather sympathetic image of living in a decaying manor house with only the solace of her faith, unlike her Protestant brother. This image is certainly an exaggeration of Mary’s actual sartorial circumstances during Edward’s reign (1547–1553) as his letters reveal how he often criticized her for dressing so boldly. Thus, her self-fashioning as an impoverished novice is pure invention, a device employed here by Webster and Dekker to again reinforce her Catholic faith. Moreover, Mary’s characterization as an older, spinster nun may also be interpreted as a nod to her future inability to conceive, as she would not be able to bear children and continue the Tudor line, which, after all, was the queen’s primary duty. The image of Mary as a poor, pious nun is sharply contrasted with her regal appearance in scene xi. Now queen, Mary is assuredly dressed in the trappings of state, the crown and royal fur-lined robes, a monarch’s most essential accessories. She then proclaims: By Gods assistance, and the power of heaven, After our Troubles we are safely set In our inheritance, for which we doe ascribe The praise and benefit to God. Next, thankes To you my Lordes. Now shall the sancturarie, And the house of the moste high be newly built. The ancient honours due unto the Church, Buried within the Ruind Monasteries, Shall lift their stately heads, and rise againe To astonish the destroyers wondering eyes. Zeale shall be deckt in golde, Religion Not like a virgin robd of all her pompe,

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But bravely shining in her Jemmes of state, Like a fair bride, be offered to the Lord. To build large houses, pull no churches downe, Rather inrich the Temple with our crowne. (III.xi.1–16)

Mary’s Catholic and royal identities converge here in both dress and action, as she vows to rebuild the Church in England with the riches of the state. The contradictory nature of these two soliloquies harkens back to one of the leading criticisms during the earlier Protestant Reformations, that is, the excess of the Catholic Church. Opulence was thus associated with corruption, and that same imagery is employed here as an attack on the Catholic queen. This image of Mary is mirrored in Thomas Heywood’s If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, which was first published in 1605. The two-part work was exceedingly popular and was subsequently printed and performed well into the Restoration period. While Heywood’s work differs from Webster and Dekker in its sharp juxtaposition of Mary and Elizabeth, it similarly draws upon the language and image of the prayer book. Here, the prayer functions as an essential prop or accessory for Elizabeth. Indeed, just as Mary extolls the richness of her prayer book with the gold mines of India in Sir Thomas Wyatt, Elizabeth claims that her Bible is “the jewel that we still love best.”36 Here, as Teresa Grant argues, the prayer book or Bible clearly represents chastity, piety, and goodness for devout women of either faith, both Catholic and Protestant, within early Jacobean drama.37 Moreover, the comparison of the prayer book or Bible to a jewel is particularly noteworthy considering the paramount role that jewelry played within the wardrobes of elite early modern women. Patricia Cholakian notes that jewels were indeed “traditionally a woman’s most sacrosanct property.”38 Such imagery and

36 Thomas Heywood, If you know not mee, you know no body. Or, The troubles of Queene

Elizabeth (London, 1639). 37 Teresa Grant, “Drama Queen: Staging Elizabeth in If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody,” in The Myth of Elizabeth, eds. Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 25. 38 Patricia Francis Cholakian, Women and the Politics of Self-Representation in Seventeenth-Century France (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000), 95.

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language therefore contain powerful symbolism.39 These sacred texts do not simply function as props but essential accessories to both Elizabeth and Mary’s pious costumes. The epithet of “Bloody Mary” continued to develop during the eighteenth century, due in great part to the looming threat of the Jacobites as well as numerous reprintings of John Foxe’s influential Actes and Monuments , which utterly demonized Mary. By the nineteenth century, her image as a cruel, murderous queen was commonplace within ballads, poetry, sermons, histories, as well as popular literature by authors such as Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, and Mark Twain.40 Twain’s brief portrayal of Mary in The Prince and the Pauper (1881) as heartless, gloomy, and holy played a significant role in further shaping her negative image, being the origin of many adaptations in film, television, and comics. Yet, I find Alfred Tennyson’s Queen Mary (1875) as particularly influential in the formation of her image as “Bloody Mary.” The play, which spans Mary’s reign and concludes with her death and Elizabeth’s accession, contains many of the tropes that traditionally define the image of “Bloody Mary.”41 Indeed, Mary is depicted as wholly devoted and submissive to Philip, with her love bordering on obsession.42 She also openly acknowledges her own Spanish heritage and sympathies, stating “I am Spanish in myself, And in my likings” after she intimately kisses a miniature portrait of her groom-to-be (I.v.9–10). Tennyson’s work also emphasizes Mary’s Catholicism, with Father Bourne even referring to her as “our second Virgin Mary” (I.iii.38–39).

39 The contrast between the two sister’s faiths are also evident here with the imagery of the prayer book. For Mary, her handling of the book may represent idolatry and superstition, another leading criticism of the Protestant Reformations, while Elizabeth’s prayer book could symbolize Protestantism’s reliance on sola scriptura, “by word alone,” without the intervention of the Church. See also Valerie Schutte, Mary I and the Art of Book Dedications: Royal Women, Power and Persuasion (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 40 Freeman, “Inventing Bloody Mary,” 86. 41 Alfred Tennyson, Queen Mary (London: Henry S. King & Co., 1875). 42 Such a depiction is an interesting contrast to Queen Victoria (r. 1837–1901), the

reigning monarch at the time of the play’s performance and circulation. Both women were queens regnant who wed foreign consorts. Victoria’s devotion to her husband Prince Albert, who died in 1861, was visually represented in the black mourning attire she subsequently donned until her own death.

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Dress also plays an interesting underlying role in the formation of Mary’s image within Tennyson’s work. Mary takes great care with her attire, almost to the point of frivolity. In scene ii of Act V, Mary frets over her appearance when the Count de Feria enters, delivering a letter from Philip. Overcome by the mere mention of her husband’s name, Mary orders her ladies to help her look more regal: Philip! quick! loop up my hair! Throw cushions on that seat, and make it throne-like. Arrange my dress—the gorgeous Indian shawl. That Philip brought me in our happy days!— That covers all. So—am I somewhat Queenlike, Bride of the mightiest sovereign upon earth? (V.ii.244–249)

Moreover, Mary is not simply concerned with her own attire but that of members of her court. In scene iv of Act I, Elizabeth compares Edward Courtenay, 1st Earl of Devon and her second cousin, to a butterfly on account of his gay dress. Courtenay states that the rich velvet and gold garb he dons was made for him when he was created Earl of Devon, in September 1553. Noting that his attire is “right royal,” Elizabeth replies: “So royal that the Queen forbad you wearing it” (I.iv.53–54). Mary is portrayed almost dictatorial here in her sartorial mandate, further reinforcing the image of her as a tyrannical and vain queen. Yet, the passage also demonstrates the understood power of dress to command power and royal authority. Sir Thomas Stafford and Sir Ralph Bagenhall, two of the insurrectionary leaders of Wyatt’s Rebellion, meet in secret within the opening scene of Act III, after Mary orders the death of her cousin Jane Grey, Guildford Dudley, and Henry Grey, 1st Duke of Suffolk, in order to ensure her marriage to Philip. She is willing to execute her own blood so that she can marry her Spanish suitor. Bagenhall recounts the royal wedding for Stafford, describing in detail the magnificence of the procession and ceremony; the royal entourage and trimmings bedecked in diamonds, pearls, and gold cloth. He criticizes the fine wedding attire of Philip, implying that these kingly clothes seem ill-fitting as he was only made King of Naples so that he might be able to wed Mary. He describes Philip as:

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Flamed in brocade—white satin his trunk-hose, Inwrought with silver,—on his neck a collar, Gold, thick with diamonds; hanging down from this. The Golden Fleece—and round his knee, misplaced, Our English Garter, studded with great emeralds, Rubies, I know not what. Have you had enough. Of all this gear? (III.i.58–64)

Bagenhall’s comment regarding the misplacement of the Order of the Garter upon a Spanish body represents the deeply ingrained xenophobia and later Black Legend of Spain that tended to dominate much of modern historiography and popular culture. Bagenhall ends his fashion report with exasperation at his companion’s interest, yet Stafford persists on in his inquiries, being most particularly curious of the queen’s attire. Bagenhall remarks that he was so struck by her footwear that he barely took notice of her dress, noting earlier that she wore red shoes: Scarlet, as if her feet were wash’d in blood, As if she had waded in it. (III.i.46–47)

When pressed for further details of her dress, Bagenhall notes that Mary wore a diamond, presumably a pendant, upon her chest being a gift from her new husband “as proof of Philip’s love” which “blazed false upon her heart” (III.i.51–53). He concludes that the queen looked: No fairer for her jewels. And I could see that as the new-made couple Came from the Minster, moving side by side Beneath one canopy, ever and anon She cast on him a vassal smile of love, Which Philip with a glance of some distaste, Or so methought, return’d. I may be wrong, sir. This marriage will not hold. (III.i.67–74)

The most striking sartorial observation remains the description of Mary’s red shoes; the vivid image of Mary’s feet forever tainted by the blood of her victims fully embodies the visual myth of “Bloody Mary.” Tennyson’s rather effective sartorial device here is one of the first instances in popular culture that directly connects Mary to bloody red dress.

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There is some historical precedence regarding the association of blood and red shoes even before the nineteenth century. Since antiquity, red shoes have symbolized power and wealth, due to the high cost of dyes, worn by Roman senators and emperors, popes and kings. In the Tudor period, red shoes were emblematic of monarchial power; both Edward IV and Henry VIII were buried in red shoes, a lasting fashion statement to reinforce their royal authority.43 The association of blood and red shoes can be traced to the seventeenth century, the period which also gave birth to the “Bloody Mary” myth. Louis XIV of France had a taste for red shoes and heels, as seen in several contemporary portraits.44 Charles II of England, who was often influenced by his cousin in matters of religion, culture, and dress, dons red heels in his coronation portrait by John Michael Wright.45 At this time, red shoes also carried a martial tone, the red on the soles being representative of (literally) crushing one’s enemies. Louis XIV is depicted with red heels on horseback in a late 1670s portrait by René-Antoine Houasse, triumphant at the Siege of Besançon in 1674.46 Later cultural works from the modern era openly associate blood with Mary’s clothing, most notably in art and portraiture. In a more recent painting by Maya Kulenovic, entitled “Double Self Portrait as Queen Mary and Lady Jane Grey” (1997–1998), Mary wears a vibrant shade of crimson while depicted alongside one of her victims, her cousin Jane Grey, dressed in an innocent white shift with scalloped edges. Her look is completed by a red blindfold in a shade matching Mary’s dress, in

43 Hilary Davidson, “Sex and Sin: The Magic of Red Shoes,” in Shoes: A History

from Sandals to Sneakers, eds. Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil (New York: Berg, 2006), 273–274. 44 See Hyacinthe Rigaud, Louis XIV , 1701, oil on canvas, 9 2"× 6 3". Musée du Louvre, Paris. 45 John Michael Wright, Charles II , c. 1671–76, oil on canvas, 281.9 × 239.2 cm, Palace of Holyroodhouse. 46 René-Antoine Houasse, Equestrian portrait of Louis XIV , c. 1679, oil on canvas,

286 × 227 cm, National Museum of Ancient Art, Lisbon. For more on red heels in the seventeenth century, see Elizabeth Semmelhack, Heights of Fashion: A History of the Elevated Shoe (Pittsburgh: Periscope, 2008); and Elizabeth Semmelhack, “A Delicate Balance: Women, Power and High Heels,” in Shoes: A History from Sandals to Sneakers, eds. Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil (New York: Berg, 2006).

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order to visually associate Mary with Jane’s death.47 Estelle Paranque has noted how red has long been used in Marian portraiture to signify blood, and that is certainly true in respect to works of art created after her death, as the myth of “Bloody Mary” began to take form.48 Yet, it is important to note that while Mary is often depicted in red within contemporary, sixteenth-century portraiture, the association of red and blood was not overt at this time, as red maintained different symbolic connotations during the Tudor period. As the image of “Bloody Mary” has become so ingrained in historiography and popular culture, it is not difficult to understand why modern eyes may look at contemporary portraiture of Mary in red dress and visually associate the shade with blood. Fashion continued to play an important role in the characterization of Mary well into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, especially with the evolution of film. Similar to Kapur’s Elizabeth, dress is also important to the characterization of Mary in the BBC miniseries The Virgin Queen (2005) as evident from the very first scene. The miniseries, like most modern biopics of Elizabeth, including Kapur’s film, begins during the aftermath of Wyatt’s Rebellion, an effective starting point in order to fully depict the challenges the young queen faced by her cruel, older sister. Elizabeth, under suspicion from the failed rebellion, hastily searches for a dress to wear for her audience with Queen Mary. She rejects the rich and colorful selections from her ladies, Lettice Knollys and Katherine (“Kat’) Ashley, claiming that they are “too gaudy” or “too red,” further noting that “if I am to live this night, I must not outshine her.”49 Such a line is reminiscent of Elizabeth’s comment from Tennyson’s Queen Mary, regarding Courtenay’s royal attire. Elizabeth here decides on a plain, humble blue dress and completes her costume with the accessory of a rosary, which she later dons around her neck. The series draws upon several similar tropes used in Kapur’s movie, including the juxtaposition between light and darkness. After Mary dies, the joyful Elizabeth rushes out from her prison into the sunlight as a chorus of “Hallelujah” sings. Moreover, as in Elizabeth, Mary’s Catholic 47 Maya Kulenovic, Double Self Portrait as Queen Mary and Lady Jane Grey (1997–98), oil on canvas, 213 × 152 cm. Goodenough College, London. 48 Estelle Paranque, “Mary Tudor: A Reassessment of ‘Bloody Mary,” Art UK, July 20, 2020, https://artuk.org/discover/stories/mary-tudor-a-reassessment-of-bloody-mary. 49 The Virgin Queen, “Part One.” Directed by Coky Giedroyc. Written by Paula Milne. BBC, January 22, 2006.

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faith is central to her characterization. She wears only black in the series, even during a brief flashback dream sequence with her father Henry VIII. She is depicted as envious of Elizabeth’s youth and popularity, bitter regarding her treatment while Anne Boleyn was in power, as well as vengeful and paranoid. Elizabeth and Mary only appear together in a single scene within the series. Elizabeth wears the same garb she donned in the opening scene while Mary appears ready for battle with her sister by wearing an armored breastplate over her opulent black dress. The armor is an interesting fashion statement and rich with symbolism. Mary explains that her marriage to Philip, which should have brought such happiness, has instead “imprisoned” her and she consequently blames the people’s unpopular view of her union on Elizabeth. For Philip’s protection, Mary must sleep alone with only the cold steel of a sword to keep her warm. She brandishes a sword at Elizabeth, tossing it at her feet and encouraging her to use it against her.50 Mary’s donning of armor here reflects her paranoia against possible assassins, Elizabeth among them, who would seek to kill her and return the country to the heresy of Protestantism. Elizabeth also dons a breastplate in Kapur’s sequel Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007) for her famed speech at Tilbury in 1588. Yet, while Elizabeth wears armor against the Spanish Armada, Mary does so against her own English people, a pointed contrast which, again, reinforces her undying affiliation with Spain. In a break from these historical dramas that depict Mary in her final years, the popular Showtime series The Tudors (2007–2010) features a young, more sympathetic Mary, beginning in her early childhood when she was the sole legitimate heir of Henry VIII and continuing until his final days.She is strong-willed in the face of adversity, loyal to her mother and Catholic faith, and supportive of Spain, having developed a close friendship with Eustace Chapuys. She is also portrayed as loving toward her half-siblings, especially Elizabeth, which contrasts with the tense and cold relationships usually emphasized in earlier works. Indeed, Maria Hayward demonstrates how fashion has been used within the series to represent a unified Tudor family, as the children are often dressed in

50 The Virgin Queen, 2006.

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similar shades of silver or wear the same wreaths of greenery to celebrate Christmas in 1536.51 Catholicism, as ever, remains an important aspect of her characterization, so much so that it strains her relationship with her final stepmother Catherine Parr. Carole Levin and Estelle Paranque reveal how the series does include many foreshadowing scenes regarding Mary’s future religious policies, noting that she “would do anything in pursuit of returning England to Catholicism, ‘the true faith.’”52 Yet, Mary’s wardrobe differs from the traditional garb of “Bloody Mary.” In her teenage years and young adulthood, her attire is not overly outlandish or excessively opulent, unlike Anne Boleyn’s sumptuous wardrobe in the series. Rather, Mary’s clothing is elegant, not ostentatious, as befitting a woman of her station. Mary does frequently wear exquisite crucifixes and darker dresses, but her wardrobe is not exclusively black, as she is often depicted wearing white, gold, green, and red throughout the series; her Catholic faith is not always so overt through her dress. Mary I has certainly undergone both an image and fashion makeover in the last several decades, as the black and blood-stained clothes of “Bloody Mary” have begun to be consigned to the back of the wardrobe.

Bibliography Primary Sources Heywood, Thomas. If you know not mee, you know no body. Or, The troubles of Queene Elizabeth. London, 1639. “Spain: February 1534, 21–28,” in Calendar of State Papers, Spain, Volume 5 Part 1, 1534–1535, ed. Pascual de Gayangos. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1886. 53–70. Tennyson, Alfred. Queen Mary. London, 1875.

51 Maria Hayward, “Fashionable Fiction: The Significance of Costumes in The Tudors,” in History, Fiction, and The Tudors: Sex, Politics, Power, and Artistic License in the Showtime Television Series, ed. William B. Robison (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 355. 52 Carole Levin and Estelle Paranque, “The Significance of the King’s Children in The Tudors,” in History, Fiction, and The Tudors: Sex, Politics, Power, and Artistic License in the Showtime Television Series, ed. William B. Robison (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 148.

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The Virgin Queen. Part One. Directed by Coky Giedroyc. Written by Paula Milne. BBC, January 22, 2006. Webster, John, D.C. Gunby, David Carnegie, and MacDonald P. Jackson. The Works of John Webster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Secondary Sources Ailes, Adrian. “Heraldry in Medieval England: Symbols of Politics and Propaganda.” In Heraldry, Pageantry and Social Display in Medieval England, edited by Peter R. Coss. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2002. Arnold, Janet. Queen Elizabeth’s Wardrobe Unlock’d. Leeds: W. S. Maney and Son Ltd, 1988. Bernis, Carmen and Amalia Descalzo. “Spanish Female Dress in the Habsburg Period.” In Spanish Fashion at the Courts of Early Modern Europe, edited by José Luis Colomer and Amalia Descalzo. Madrid: Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica, 2014. Bolland, Charlotte. Tudor & Jacobean Portraits. London: National Portrait Gallery, 2018. Brown, Pamela Allen. “The Mirror and the Cage: Queens and Dwarfs at the Early Modern Court.” In Historical Affects and the Early Modern Stage, edited by Ronda Arab, Michelle Dowd, and Adam Zucker. New York: Routledge, 2015. Carter, Alison J. “Mary Tudor’s Wardrobe of Robes: Documentary and Visual Evidence of Mary’s Dress Style As Princess, 1516–1553, and As Mary I, Queen of England, 1553–1558.” MA thesis, University of London, Courtauld Institute of Art, 1982. Cholakian, Patricia Francis. Women and the Politics of Self-Representation in Seventeenth-Century France. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000. Colomer, José Luis. “Black and the Royal Image.” In Spanish Fashion at the Courts of Early Modern Europe, edited by José Luis Colomer and Amalia Descalzo. Madrid: Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica, 2014. Cumming, Valerie, C.W. Cunnington and P.E. Cunnington, eds. The Dictionary of Fashion History. New York: Berg, 2010. Davidson, Hilary. “Sex and Sin: The Magic of Red Shoes.” In Shoes: A History from Sandals to Sneakers, edited by Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil. New York: Berg, 2006. Doda, Hilary. “Of Crymsen Tissue: The Construction of a Queen. Identity, Legitimacy and the Wardrobe of Mary Tudor.” MA thesis, Dalhousie University, Halifax, 2011.

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––––––. “Lady Mary to Queen of England: Transformation, Ritual, and the Wardrobe of the Robes.” In The Birth of a Queen: Essays on the Quincentenary of Mary I , edited by Sarah Duncan and Valerie Schutte. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Doran, Susan and Thomas Freeman, eds. Mary Tudor: Old and New Perspectives. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Freeman, Thomas. “Inventing Bloody Mary: Perceptions of Mary Tudor from the Restoration to the Twentieth Century.” In Mary Tudor: Old and New Perspectives, edited by Susan Doran and Thomas Freeman. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Grant, Teresa. “Drama Queen: Staging Elizabeth in If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody.” In The Myth of Elizabeth, edited by Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. ––––––. “Dramatic Representations of Mary Tudor in the Early Years of the Seventeenth Century.” In Mary Tudor: Old and New Perspectives, edited by Susan Doran and Thomas Freeman. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Hayward, Maria. Dress at the Court of King Henry VIII. New York: Routledge, 2007. ––––––. “Crimson, Scarlet, Murrey and Carnation: Red at the Court of Henry VIII” Textile History, 38 (November 2007): 135–150. ––––––. Rich Apparel: Clothing and the Law in Henry VIII’s England. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009. ––––––. “Fashionable Fiction: The Significance of Costumes in The Tudors.” In History, Fiction, and The Tudors: Sex, Politics, Power, and Artistic License in the Showtime Television Series, edited by William B. Robison. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Hayward, Maria and Philip Ward, eds. The Inventory of King Henry VIII: Textiles and Dress. London: Harvey Miller for the Antiquaries, 2012. Latham, Bethany. Elizabeth I in Film and Television: A Study of the Major Portrayals. London: McFarland & Company, 2011. Levin, Carole. The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Levin, Carol and Estelle Paranque. “The Significance of the King’s Children in The Tudors.” In History, Fiction, and The Tudors: Sex, Politics, Power, and Artistic License in the Showtime Television Series, edited by William B. Robison. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Loades, David. The Tudor Court. Bangor: Headstart History, 1986. Lynn, Eleri. Tudor Fashion. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017. ––––––. Tudor Textiles. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020. Paranque, Estelle. “Mary Tudor: A Reassessment of ‘Bloody Mary.” Art UK, July 20, 2020, https://artuk.org/discover/stories/mary-tudor-a-reassessment-ofbloody-mary.

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Peterson, Harold Leslie. Arms and Armor in Colonial America, 1526–1783. New York: Dover Publications, 2000. Pleydell, Bethany Helen. “The Spanish Tudors: Fashioning the Anglo-Spanish Elite through Dress, c. 1554–1603, and beyond.” PhD diss., University of Bristol, 2018. Ravenscroft, Janet. “Dwarfs—and a Loca—as Ladies’ Maids at the Spanish Habsburg Courts.” In The Politics of Female Households: Ladies-in-waiting across Early Modern Europe, edited by Nadine Akkerman and Birgit Houben. Boston: Brill, 2014. Richards, Judith M. Mary Tudor. New York: Routledge, 2008. Samson, Alexander. Mary and Philip: The Marriage of Tudor England and Habsburg Spain. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020. Semmelhack, Elizabeth. Heights of Fashion: A History of the Elevated Shoe. Pittsburgh: Periscope, 2008. ––––––. “A Delicate Balance: Women, Power and High Heels.” In Shoes: A History from Sandals to Sneakers, edited by Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil. New York: Berg, 2006. Schutte, Valerie. Mary I and the Art of Book Dedications: Royal Women, Power and Persuasion. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Sharpe, Kevin. Selling the Tudor Monarchy: Authority and Image in SixteenthCentury England. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. Wells, Christopher William. ““Court ‘Monsters’: Deformity in the Western European Royal Courts between 1500 and 1700.” Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural, vol. 7, no. 2, 2018, 182–214.

Mary I in The Ringed Castle Alexander Samson

In 2017, Sarah Hughes reassured us in The Guardian’s books blog that Dorothy Dunnett’s The Lymond Chronicles (1961–1975) series, six novels tracing the adventures of the titular Frances Lymond across the murky political world of early modern Europe’s intriguing courts, offered “far more than sex and swords.” Detailing her love affair with the books, four sets in thirty years and the first thing she would save from a house fire after her children, Hughes argued that the key to these historical novels is their resistance of sentimentality: although not averse to melodrama, they are so much more than “rollicking bodice-rippers,” possessed of “complex and complicated female characters” and a liberal sprinkling of erudition, “French, Spanish and Latin, obscure period references and classical allusions.”1 Dunnett’s publishers, Penguin, likewise underline in their inevitably laudatory write up that her superb historical fiction’s

1 https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2017/oct/19/dorothy-dunnettslymond-chronicles-far-more-than-sex-and-swords [Accessed: 15 February 2021].

A. Samson (B) University College London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 V. Schutte and J. S. Hower (eds.), Writing Mary I, Queenship and Power, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95132-0_9

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worldwide acclaim was won “for her blend of scholarship and imagination.” Her initial success came in America in 1961 after the editor, Lois Cole, who had worked on Gone with the Wind, snapped up the, for British publishing houses overly long, six-hundred-page manuscript of the first novel in the Lymond Chronicles series, Game of Kings. The last appeared in 1975. Awarded the OBE for services to literature in 1992, her hero Francis Crawford pipped Trainspotting ’s Begbie at the post in a 2014 Scottish Book Trust poll as the favorite character from a Scottish book.2 In 2016 Poldark producers Mammoth Screen optioned the series, although we are yet to see the books on screen.3 This essay argues that the fifth novel in The Lymond Chronicles series, set in the reign of Philip and Mary I, constitutes a serious historiographical intervention, offering a prescient vision of the reign that has foreshadowed the changing consensus in scholarship on the period. It opens by analyzing Dunnett’s stylistic pastiche of her extensive primary source research, demonstrating how its intricate plot and panoramic cast of historical figures decenters individual agency, while its minute attention to material, literary, and cartographic culture conjures up an embodied world evoking a legible time and place that is accessible but erudite. It proposes that history is always written in the shadow of the imaginative play of the literary, while literature depends on the fixed reference points of historicity. The novel exemplifies historical fiction’s power to undo the ravages of history, to restore the past to what it should be, rescue it from the endless process of its making and unmaking. This aspect is notable in relation to gender history, women’s voices are restored to the past and possess an appropriate shaping role in the reign of England’s first queen. My argument for the novel’s historiographical prescience departs from a consideration of Dunnett’s expansive framing of the reign of Philip and Mary in international context. Trade and exploration lie at its heart. Jingoist nationalism and religious bigotry, evident in many of the sources available to her, are eschewed in favor of a broad panorama of European history. This foreshadows the transnational turn apparent in much recent work on the Marian period. Furthermore, by adopting

2 https://www.penguin.co.uk/authors/21579/dorothy-dunnett.html?tab=penguin-bio graphy [Accessed: 15 February 2021]. 3 https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/drama/poldark-producers-line-up-new-heroic-histor ical-drama-the-lymond-chronicles/ [Accessed: 15 February 2021].

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the ethnographic eye of sources on Russia and placing those perspectives in the mouths of erudite, educated elites, whose interests straddled both courtly and mercantile worlds, it anchors historical judgments in a thick, sticky dialogic context. In this way, the novel navigates the negative historical judgments of Philip and Mary contemporary with Dunnett by casting these historical ideas as everyday conversation pieces, subjective perspectives which await posterity’s resolution. Its principal plot surrounds the founding of the Muscovy Company in this period and the implication of England’s courtly elite in these early colonial endeavors, spurred on in particular by their close proximity to the example of Spain as a result of the match. The novel is able to celebrate early English exploration and the dynastic marriage linking England and Spain, by placing the politics of the British Isles at this time at the heart of global(ising) developments. Neither Spain, the Spanish, nor Philip himself are othered. They are simply another group pursuing their own agendas. In the end, Philip accedes to the arms exports to Russia, despite potential protests from the Hanse, persuaded by Lymond’s commitment to securing Muscovy’s southern frontier with the Ottomans’ ally and vassal state, the Sp-Crimean Khanate. Although Mary herself is not a central character in the novel, her appearances being limited to a series of cameos, the consequences of England’s first regnant queen are constantly under discussion by other figures and she is often framed through disagreements between male and female characters, a bracketing off that foregrounds the significance of gender history for this period. So while all of the negative, misogynistic assumptions about Mary are present, they are marginalized as, for example, the view from a “barbarous” Muscovy. The essay begins with an analysis of the novelistic techniques Dunnett employed to bring the past and present into contact with each other, teasing out some of the implications of her intricate evocation of a material, embodied past. It sketches out what we know about her historical research and the kinds of scholarly work she would have had access to, writing when she did. It then moves on to analyze what she does with this archival groundwork in the novel, before reviewing the main literary critical judgments of her work and reflecting on the historical novel’s Janus-faced function as both literature and history. A brief summary of the plot is necessary to contextualize the discussion. In the first part, The Ringed Castle’s narrative is split between Frances Lymond and his band of St. Mary’s mercenaries in Tsar Ivan the

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Terrible’s Muscovy, while his betrothed, Philippa Sommerville, becomes a lady in waiting at court to Mary I. In Russia, Lymond is appointed Voevoda Bolshoia, supreme military commander, tasked with building a modern army, whose first test is the historic 1556 campaign against the Crimean Khanate, led by the Cossack leader Dmytro Vyshnevetsky. In England, Philippa is embroiled in the court intrigues of Lymond’s enemy Margaret Douglas, the Countess of Lennox, and discovers the illegitimacy of her prospective husband. Linking the two plots is the story of the Muscovy Company’s journey led by Richard Chancellor to establish trading links with Ivan, following the failure of Sir Hugh Willoughby’s earlier voyage. Lymond is dispatched back to England by the Tsar to secure munitions, shipwrecked off the coast of Scotland, before being reunited with Philippa in London, where negotiations with the Privy Council, representatives of the Muscovy Company and the Russian ambassador, Osep Nepeja, proceed under the surveillance of the Spanish and Philip II. Although he manages to secure the export of the weapons, Lymond is tricked by Philippa into boarding a French ship which extricates him from the dangerous capital and prevents him from returning to the service of Ivan. For a writer who sold over half a million copies of her books, the lack of academic writing on Dunnett’s work is something of a puzzle, with only one monograph by Scott Richardson from 2016.4 This is a psychological study of the series’ protagonist. In the Foreword to Elspeth Morrison’s The Dorothy Dunnett Companion, Dunnett described the research she undertook in libraries, museums, and galleries, admitting that she should have taken note of her sources, which are as a result “largely absent among my own papers,” including worst of all “the sources for the quotations.”5 The Companion is in some sense a compensation for this lack, with encyclopedic entries on characters, places, events, quotations, and practices, a reconstruction of the factual underpinnings of the historical background. Dunnett’s ODNB entry pays tribute to the extensiveness of this research which went beyond published reference books and included primary sources: she became “as familiar with obscure historical records as many professional historians” and claimed in the Daily Telegraph that 4 Scott Richardson, Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles: The Enigma of Frances Crawford (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2016). 5 Elspeth Morrison, The Dorothy Dunnett Companion (New York: Vintage Books, 2001), ix.

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“imagination is the last resort to use when research fails.”6 The denselytextured prose of the novels pays tribute to this immersion in the historical record, in particular her evocative descriptions of material culture so reminiscent of the fascination with the situation, precedence, clothing, and costume everywhere in contemporary sources. The somewhat dull classificatory lists that typify the festival text, its endless roll calls of participants, their relative status, servants, livery, and dress are reflected in descriptive passages harking on the material texture of the past.7 The passage below illustrates this grounding of the narrative in an obsessive concern for the materials of history and historical materials: Tricked out in new Russian gowns of branched velvet and gold, furred with sable and squirrel and ermine, and edged and faced with black beaver, Diccon Chancellor and his four English gentlemen rode through the ranks of packed faces… past the scaffolding of the Tsar’s new Cathedral of St Basil, and dismounted at the Frolovskaya Tower, the ceremonial entrance to the Kremlin, where yet another company of soldiers awaited them at the bridge, in damascened helmets and coats of mail, with blue and silver tunics… the Tsar sat on his raised golden throne, foiled and jewelled as the ikon above his crowned head, the brocade of his gown seeded with pearls and plated with deep-moulded orphrey… On his head was a different 6 https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/ odnb-9780198614128-e-76440?rskey=6GmUgC&result=1 [Accessed: 15 February 2021]. Article by Belinda Copson. There is of course an extensive literature on the relationship between history and fiction, with noteworthy contributions on the Tudors from Susan Doran and Thomas Freeman, eds, Tudors and Stuarts on Film: Historical Perspectives (New York: MacMillan, 2008), to Jerome de Groot (cited below); Hayden White, “Introduction: Historical Fiction, Fictional History, and Historical Reality,” Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 9 (2005), 147–57; see also John Demos, “Afterword: Notes from, and About, the History/Fiction Borderland” in the same issue 329–35; and Jessica Hower, “‘All Good Stories’: Historical Fiction in Pedagogy, Theory and Scholarship,” Rethinking History 23 (2019), 78–125. 7 The British Library’s “Treasures in Full: Renaissance Festival Texts” provides over two hundred and fifty notable examples from their collections of this rich embodied world and its ritual and ceremonial importance: https://www.bl.uk/treasures/festivalb ooks/homepage.html [Last Accessed: 19 May 2021]. On material culture at the Tudor court see Suzannah Lipscomb and Thomas Betteridge, eds, Henry VIII and the Court: Art, Politics and Performance (London: Routledge, 2013), especially Part II: Material Culture: Rich Pickings, with essays by Maria Hayward, Glenn Richardson and Elizabeth Hurren.

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diadem: on his shoulders a robe of dark blue and green velvet on a crimson silk ground, all wrought with gold and coloured silk pomegranates. The cup he held out was baroque mother-of-pearl set in silver… The bedcover was of fox fur and the bolster of drawn threadwork; the bed was new, with a canopy of changeable taffeta lined with sarsenet and tasselled with silk and gold.8

From cut and style to the cloth and furs desired for trade, the architecture, furniture, and regalia, this passage immerses us in the glamorous materiality of court life. It echoes the specular projections of contemporary sources carefully structured in accordance with status and political world fabricated through textiles. The writer, journalist, and sometime bullfighter Alexander Fiske Harrison noted somewhat uncharitably in his TLS review of Gemini, Dunnett’s last novel in The House of Nicolò series (prequel to The Lymond Chronicles ) that the “rhythm of her writings is often awkward in descriptive passages containing unwieldy lists of information.”9 However, their significance is not literary, but rather key to the novel’s historicity. The dazzle of material objects blind to what Hilary Mantel dubbed the “obscenity” of history, shifting the gaze from its violence and horror onto its glittering cultural achievements. The remarkable technical skill and opulence of the past’s material culture haunts the present, spectrally and uncannily available to induce a wonder that occludes the singularity of these traces and the orientation of a whole world towards their production. They are not simply harmless bling. Rather they are the reverse of the everyday, the opposite of the representative that they have become for us. The list of textiles and furs (velvet, brocade, taffeta, sarsenet, silk, sable, beaver, fox) point us to the careful indexing of social status through clothing and furnishings of the period, but more importantly resonate with the mercantile interests of the Muscovy Company, around which the plot is structured. In a Publishers Weekly interview, Jean Richardson averred that “the novels are remarkable for their historical accuracy and an attention to

8 Dorothy Dunnett, The Ringed Castle (London: Penguin Random House, 2017, 1st pub. 1971), 169–70, 177, 179. 9 Alexander Fiske Harrison, “Connected by Blood,” The Times Literary Supplement, no. 5080, 11 August 2000, 23.

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detail that any academic historian might envy.”10 This assessment underlines the focus on the texture and materiality of history, as a synecdoche for its otherness. Exacting detail drawn from ample research creates the texture of a rich, materially embodied world. Accuracy is synonymous with detail: an elision available to the historical novelist whose sources are the stimuli for the imaginative creation of a context, which for the historian are the sources themselves. Dunnett’s obsessive attention to the material included her plotting out the journeys undertaken, working out how long each stage, by ship, on horseback, or by sled would take, even though the majority of this information does not make it into the books. Building on this focus on material culture and the minute evocation of time and place through associated copious detail, another technique characteristically employed by Dunnett to foster the impression of historicity is incorporating a tapestry of primary source quotations directly into the narrative. This linguistic pastiche complements the material patchwork of the physical world. Crawford’s intelligence, for example, includes sections of a letter from the Emperor to the Duke of Alba: “For the love of God see to it that my son behaves in the right manner, for otherwise I tell you I had rather never have taken the matter in hand in the first place”; dispatches from England detailing how the queen “has not consented to marry from any carnal affection or desire, nor from any motive but her kingdom’s honour and prosperity… All present… had tears in their eyes”; and in early August the Spaniards exclaiming “the Queen is a good creature, but rather older than they had been told, although if she dressed in their fashions she might not look so old and so flabby. At least they conclude, the King of England (as he now styles himself) fully realizes that the marriage was concluded for no fleshly consideration, but in order to remedy the disorders of the kingdom and preserve the Low Countries.”11 A number of sources are run together in these passages, chronologically inverted, with quotations from the State Papers Spanish, Mary’s Guildhall speech, and a letter from Ruy Gomez da Silva. Far from flabby the original alludes to the queen’s flaqueza or skinniness, although Dunnett follows the Victorian translator’s mistranslation. The cannibalization of past narratives or accounts might be seen as characteristic of realist fiction, 10 Jean Richardson, “Dorothy Dunnett: An Historical Pageant,” Publishers Weekly, 11 May 1998, 46–7, 46. 11 Dunnett, The Ringed Castle, 54–5. The novelist refers to the presence of the Duchess in England for the marriage, see 132.

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central to the historicity on which it depends, a superseding of the past through its translation and recasting. As Jerome de Groot has argued: the intergeneric hybridity and flexibility of historical fiction have long been one of its defining characteristics. A historical novel might consider the articulation of nationhood via the past, highlight the subjectivism of narrative of History, underline the importance of the realist mode of writing to notions of authenticity, question writing itself, and attack historiographical convention. The form manages to hold within itself conservatism, dissidence, complication and simplicity; it attracts multiple, complex dynamic audiences12

The Ringed Castle engages with precisely these questions, articulating a particular vision of statehood that emphasizes the pan-European cultural world of the early modern and cleaves to its materialist embodiment in order to question in particular providentially inspired readings of England’s history. Dunnett’s historical novel possesses authenticity through its reproduction of sources, in addition to what at times appears to be the stylistic pastiche of archival documents and printed accounts. Despite elisions and inaccuracies that arise from the way they are eclectically pieced together, their a-chronological and a-contextual inclusion, that threaten to produce troubling distortions to their facticity, at the same time they allow the novel to interrogate historiographical convention, especially the role of women in the past. Tellingly, the highly personal comment about Mary’s age, unfashionable clothes, and unmodish thinness, that has echoed down through historical accounts of her and her reign is reproduced without comment, telling us more about its Spanish speaker than its subject. That something so apparently trivial and superficial should loom so large in historiography perhaps casts a less then flattering light on professional historians’ focus on understanding the operations of power and causality in the personal, while for Dunnett its importance lies in the way “relatable” details create persuasive representations of the past and its misogyny. The habit of making reference to the sources for a given historical fiction in an Author’s note from Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies to Isabel Allende’s Inés del alma mía goes back to the very origins of the historical novel, prominent not

12 Jerome de Groot, The Historical Novel, the New Critical Idiom (London: Routledge, 2010), 2.

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least in its alleged instigator Sir Walter Scott.13 For Jerome de Groot it is a gesture that goes back to the inception of the novel itself with Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, in which fictions of/from the past are misread as historical sources. The sign of Quixote’s madness is his inability to distinguish between the supposed historicity of fictional romances of chivalry and history. Reading fiction as history sees the aging hidalgo misrecognize in a fundamental way the world around him, forever distorted through the lens of an idealized past. Here relevance, a purely presentist understanding of history is exposed in all its absurdity. If history is other and the present familiar, the historian attempts “to explain the transition between these states,” while the historical novelist “explores the dissonance and displacement between then and now, making the past recognizable but simultaneously authentically unfamiliar.”14 It is in the distancing and its collapse that what is other can become familiar, legible, or puzzlingly other. In this play between familiarity and estrangement, Dunnett is able to question historiographical tradition even as she draws on it. The Ringed Castle begins with an author’s note to the effect that “[n]o one could write of the remarkable events leading up to the visit of Osep Nepeja without mentioning a profound debt to the published studies of Professor T. S. Willan of the University of Manchester,”15 a reference to his two indispensable monographs, The Muscovy Merchants of 1555 and The Early History of the Russia Company, 1553–1603.16 In addition to these acknowledged sources, the text is spattered as we have seen with 13 Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies (London: Fourth Estate, 2012), 409–10 and Isabel Allende, Inés del alma mía (Barcelona: Mondadori, 2006), Advertencia necesaria (“narro los hechos tal como fueron documentados”), Agradecimientos (“me ayudaron en la investigación de la época”), and Apuntes Bibliográficos, 365–7. 14 de Groot, The Historical Novel, 3, 7 (on Author’s Notes) and 12–13 (on Cervantes). 15 Dunnett, The Ringed Castle, Author’s Note. My attraction to writing this essay

was precisely the rediscovery of scholarship by figures like Willan, whose solid archival research still provides the ground for work on Russia and its “discovery” in Western European travel writing. It reminds me of the invaluable Challis’ The Tudor Coinage and more recently Patrick Williams’ The Great Favourite. 16 T. S. Willan, The Muscovy Merchants of 1555 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1953) and The Early History of the Russia Company, 1553–1603 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1956). Willan’s work on economic history continues to be indispensable for maritime historians including for a recent doctorate on the Elizabethan coasting trade, drawing on his The English Coasting Trade, 1600–1750 (1938) and The Inland Trade (1976) both from Manchester. See: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/ people/obituary-professor-t-s-willan-1424285.html [Accessed: 7 January 2021].

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partial-quotations from the State Papers and sources like John Elder’s “Copie of a Letter.”17 Published in 1971, The Ringed Castle pre-dates David Loades’ The Reign of Mary Tudor (1979) and his biography from a decade later, as well as Jennifer Loach and Robert Tittler’s The MidTudor Polity (1980).18 As far as can be gleaned from The Dorothy Dunnett Companion it appears that her main narrative sources for the reign of Philip and Mary were Helen Simpson’s The Spanish Marriage (1933) and Beatrice White’s Mary Tudor (1935). In a review of the former, R. B. Wernham, familiar for his seminal work on Tudor foreign relations, before and after the Armada, berated “that insubstantial and stimulantloving Mrs ‘Arris [who] possesses an infinitesimal capacity for absorbing facts about any subject, and an infinite capacity for listening to a writer’s opinion thereupon. He (or she) abhors references, though he finds an appended ‘list of authorities’ reassuring.”19 The coruscating tone of the review softens when it comes to “Miss Simpson’s… lively and sympathetic account of Mary Tudor’s life,” although the marriage contract is not signed until p. 110 and Philip only arrives on p. 146: “religious persecution is not mentioned, and nothing is said of the disastrous war into which Philip dragged his wife and her unwilling subjects. Nowhere is the name of Calais graven upon these pages!”20 Beatrice White’s biography of Mary “sympathetically situated the queen’s tragedy in the context of Mary’s fidelity to outmoded loyalties” and attempted to “correct the warped historical judgement of ‘Bloody’ Mary… underpinned by an examination of contemporary documents and state papers.”21 David Loades’ indispensable review article on historiography and research on

17 Reproduced in John Gough Nichols, ed, The Chronicle of Queen Jane and of Two Years of Queen Mary and Especially of the Rebellion of Sir Thomas Wyatt, Camden Society XLVIII (London: The Camden Society, 1850), Appendix X. 18 David Loades, The Reign of Mary Tudor: Politics, Government and Religion, 1553– 1558 (London: Longman, 1st pub. 1979, 2nd ed, 1991); ibid., Mary Tudor: A Life (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989); and Jennifer Loach and Robert Tittler, eds, The MidTudor Polity, c. 1540–1560 (London: Macmillan, 1980). 19 R. B. Wernham, “Review of Elizabeth, Queen of England, Milton Waldman; The Armada, by Lorna Rea; The Spanish Marriage, 1554, Helen Simpson,” History n.s. 19 (1934), 65–6, 66. 20 Ibid. 21 https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/

odnb-9780198614128-e-39549?rskey=di6Xeg&result=1 [Accessed: 16 February 2021].

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Mary situated White’s work between Pollard’s dismissal of her as a “perverse bigot” whose reign betokened “sterility” and the hagiographic Jean Stone’s Mary the First, Queen of England from 1901. It is worth noting that Stone accorded Mary her proper title, a nomenclature around which consensus is coalescing again. White’s biography cast the queen as a “woman who was to go down to posterity unwept, unhonoured and unsung. Her many admirable qualities, her absolute sincerity, her fine integrity, her high courage, lofty and abiding—qualities of leadership, princely qualities—were deadened by a fatal lack of that subtle appeal that awakens popular sympathies.”22 On Philip, the Companion cites Geoffrey Parker’s 1978 biography, although this postdates the novel, while the other source William Hickering Prescott’s History of the Reign of Philip the Second pre-dates it by more than a century.23 In order to understand the ways in which historical fiction can move beyond and so push academic history in new directions it is necessary to contrast the historians, grounding the novelist’s fictionalizing, with what the writer does with and to their shared sources. White’s positioning of Mary as competent and stateswomanly certainly seems to have influenced Dunnett.24 But there are older survivals wrapped up in her eclectic and contradictory presentation in the novel, partially as a result of its differing narrative perspectives. The protagonist Frances Crawford of Lymond’s informant Hercules Tait fills him in that in England “there was no other occupation but the cutting of heads,” while the Commons “had been begging the Queen not to proceed with her plan to marry Prince Philip.”25 These are stock elements of historiography. When Philippa Somerville, Crawford’s teenage bride, arrives at the court of the queen “with the badger’s nose and faded red hair and small, anchorite’s body within the stiff, quarried case of her costume,” she goes on to observe, quoting the Venetian ambassador, that Mary “rose at

22 David Loades, “The Reign of Mary Tudor: Historiography and Research,” Albion 21 (1989), 547–58, 549. 23 Geoffrey Parker, Philip II (London: Hutchinson, 1979) and W. H. Prescott, The

History of the Reign of Philip the Second, King of Spain (London: Routledge and Sons, 1855). 24 It does not seem that Helen Prescott’s Spanish Tudor (1940, rev. 1952) was an influence, although bringing biographical and historical traditions back together and remaining the standard life until David Loades’ in 1989. 25 Dunnett, The Ringed Castle, 53.

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daybreak: she heard Mass in private before plunging straight into business, which she transacted without pause till past midnight.”26 Philippa soon comes to understand the obsessive hard work as a compensation for “a woman who was only moderately clever” (a deliberate softening of Geoffrey Elton’s verdict of her stupidity), but also lights on details like “her fierce joy in gambling… her bird-cages; in her enjoyment of children,” again a conflation of a number of sources, Privy Purse expenses, patronage of John Heywood, and accounts of her death bed.27 Deploying at the time recognizable elements of Mary’s reputation, Dunnett included other less familiar and more sympathetic elements, less well-known such as her love of gambling and assiduousness as a ruler. The description of Mary embodies her historiographical reputation in textile and body. Her dress is a “quarried case,” stony and unyielding, while the recondite term “anchorite” connotes pastness, asceticism, and profound spirituality, a fanaticism directed inwards at self-denial. The description points to costume and physical appearance as emblematic of the queen, while at the same time underlining how it traps and dissimulates the human within, a stifling historical reputation. The red hair, linking her to the Tudors, is “faded,” a metonym for her age and historical outmodedness in relation to the dynasty from which she comes in terms of how it and she are remembered. In the letter Philippa writes to Lymond from court she reveals that Mary’s religious fervor does not assuage her moods, but “her outbursts of temper are quickly over: her intentions always good.”28 The situatedness of narrative perspective weakens the grip of long-standing historiography, even as it is invoked. Her lady in waiting’s duty lies with this “small, unhappy, violent woman and the tragedy of her marriage,” a queen who serves “with iron good humor, this sick, harassed woman, hagridden by wearing compulsions.”29 Later in the novel Philippa laments that because Mary was “Alone and sick on a diet of promises, with war rushing toward her, and her sister, sweetly recalcitrant, in the city, the Queen was in no

26 Dunnett, The Ringed Castle, 86–7. 27 Dunnett, The Ringed Castle, 93. 28 Dunnett, The Ringed Castle, 104. 29 Dunnett, The Ringed Castle, 107 and 121.

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mood to permit her women to leave her.”30 The novel insistently complicates the representation of Mary, proffering and withholding sympathy, elliptically alluding to negative traits drawn from her historical reputation, while balancing them with redemptive ones, weaving the actions of elites and their cultural world through subjective desires and the concerns of individuals, whose inner worlds are instantly recognizable. At Lymond’s eventual audience with Mary, she “looked ill… her neck thickly ringed with large pearls within her rigid winged collar, and her gemmed skirts unwieldy as curtains, she breathed from her stillness a kind of violent impatience,” while Philip, suffering from venereal disease contracted in the Low Countries “was wearing the dress sent him by his bride for their wedding day, of cloth of gold with English roses and pomegranates, all picked out in gold beads and seed pearls… nine table diamonds, and his white plumed bonnet had a little chain and a medallion with diamonds and rubies.”31 Again Mary’s historiographical reputation is translated into fabric, while Philip remains ornamental, improbably wearing the clothes given to him for his entry into Winchester in 1554. The monarchs’ reputations are discussed in a debate toward the end of the novel between Lymond and Phillipa. Answering his accusation that Mary is “asinine,” she encourages him to read “reports” that demonstrate the queen’s repeated requests and disappointments, in the end she notes she had taken “his [Philip’s] picture down and kicked it out of the Privy Chamber” and dispatched Paget to Brussels: Lymond accedes that his bride is right “She is far from asinine. This Queen is tragic,” drawing out of their “debate” a cornerstone of modern historiography.32 By casting the verdict in the context of a dialog, it underlines the subjective nature of historical judgment. This notion of Mary and the emotional response it entails postdates the debate staged in this scene by three centuries.

30 Dunnett, The Ringed Castle, 357. 31 Dunnett, The Ringed Castle, 430–1. At this audience Margaret Lennox wears the

brooch, “showing the History of Our Saviour Healing the Man with the Palsy,” that Mary had given her twelve years before, ibid., 433. 32 Dunnett, The Ringed Castle, 421–2. See Thomas Freeman, “Inventing Bloody Mary: Perceptions of Mary from the Restoration to the Twentieth Century,” in Mary Tudor: Old and New Perspectives, ed. Susan Doran and Thomas Freeman (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 78–102. This petulant outburst sees her direct her anger against Titian’s portrait of Philip in wolfskin.

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The trope of tragedy that came to cast its pall over Mary followed the revisionist work of John Lingard’s History of England and Agnes Strickland’s Lives of the Queens of England in the early nineteenth century33 and is apparent in Dunnett’s version of England’s first queen. Lingard and Strickland had attempted to move beyond sectarian historiography, minimizing Mary’s agency in the religious persecution for which her reign became remembered. So, she became cast as victim rather than fanatic. Dunnett’s secularized version of the reign balances notions of Mary as tragic and impotent with references to her agency, her good intentions, and humor. While Lymond tells the Tsar Ivan the Terrible, the “people of England are unhappy with the prince their Queen has married,” Philippa notes that following her pregnancy Philip “paid dutiful visits, and held her hand, and talked in slow, articulated Spanish and listened, patiently, while she answered in French,” although the exchanges were more formal than before “Philippa thought.”34 References to King Philip in the novel accord the Habsburg and his Spanish court a role in the novel more significant than the historiography it builds from. The Spanish attempt to help Lymond achieve the mission for which he has returned to England, arming Muscovy. It also cites the prince’s own assertions against English suspicions: “He wished to enjoy his states, he said, rather than to increase them.”35 Far from the pious and unemotional figure of Black Legend, a number of arch references are made to Philip’s lasciviousness, enabled by Ruy Gomez de Silva, in Brussels, along with his lover Isabel de Osorio (mistranscribed Osario) and “their family.”36 While the Spanish are not presented as villainous, Ruy Gomez de Silva bears the weight of historic Hispanophobia, dismissed as sexually predatory, presiding over his master’s peccadillos and marrying a child bride. A staple piece of evidence illuminating Spain’s engagement with the religious policy was Alfonso de Castro’s intervention after the Bishop of Gloucester, John Hooper’s execution: “King Philip’s chaplain had preached a long calming

33 John Lingard, The History of England, from the First Invasion of the Romans (to the Revolution in 1688) (London: n.p., 1819–30), 8 vols. and Agnes and Elizabeth Strickland, The Lives of the Queens of England (Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard, 1840–48), 10 vols. 34 Dunnett, The Ringed Castle, 133 and 182. 35 Dunnett, The Ringed Castle, 431. 36 Dunnett, The Ringed Castle, 92 and 94.

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sermon on tolerance, upbraiding the Bishops for cruelty.”37 Its significance has long been the subject of revisionist reassessment.38 Passing reference to Juana la Loca’s death “for which her grandson announced he felt a reasonable regret,” displaces a comment allegedly made by Philip about Mary herself, although it has been shown to be a mistranslation of the Victorian Calendar.39 Perhaps it is a truism that countries rarely dwell in their historiography on threats to their dissolution and instead prioritize their triumphs. The novel’s internationalism repeatedly highlights the parochialism of English historiography. When finally the Privy Council grant Lymond the license to export arms to Russia, his comrade Danny Hislop cites back with heavy irony to his master John Elder’s translation of the verses that graced Philip’s London Entry in 1554: “Mind, voice, study, power and will, Is only set to love thee, Philip, still.”40 Earlier in the novel Roger Ascham and Philippa have discussed Elder, dubbed by the Latin secretary “That mountebank,” continuing slightingly “John Redshanks… An amateur cosmographer from some puny church in a place called Dumbarton. Who claims Henry Darnley to surpass the late King Edward.”41 They discuss Elizabeth and the succession: “A son will bring Burgundy and the Low Countries to England. If Don Carlos were to die, it might unite England wholly with Spain.”42 The Ringed Castle makes clear, along with the distinct possibility of this unification of England and Spain, the economic motives central to the marriage, closing in July 1557 with Philip’s final departure from England and Mary commending

37 Dunnett, The Ringed Castle, 108. 38 See Eamon Duffy, Fires of Faith: Catholic England Under Mary Tudor (New Haven:

Yale University Press, 2008) and John Edwards, Mary I: England’s Catholic Queen (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011). 39 Dunnett, The Ringed Castle, 120. Pointed out by Gonzalo Velasco Berenguer, see my Mary and Philip: The Marriage of Tudor England and Habsburg Spain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020), 187. 40 Dunnett, The Ringed Castle, 431 and 451. John Elder’s The Copie of a Letter Sent in to Scotlande… (London: John Wayland, 1555) reprinted in The Chronicle of Queen Jane and of Two Years of Queen Mary…, ed. John Gough Nichols, Camden Society XLVIII (London: The Camden Society, 1850). 41 Dunnett, The Ringed Castle, 96–7. 42 Dunnett, The Ringed Castle, 97.

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him to the love of her subjects, closely followed by the departure of the Muscovy fleet, with the epigraphs: “There is no land uninhabitable or sea unnavigable” and “They made the whole world to hang in the air,” quotations inscribed in the front cover of the apocryphal Cicero De republica, with which Lymond bribed Secretary Petre. The first comes, we are told in the passage, from a letter from the merchant Robert Thorne to Henry VIII, while the second is Eden’s description of explorers like Richard Chancellor.43 Deidre Serjeantson’s fascinating unpublished article analyzing Lymond’s library reveals the puzzle of the missing Cicero. She underlines the cosmopolitanism of the republic of letters and draws attention to the culture of commonplacing that comes out in the novel’s characters copious citation of well-known literary and historical sources, witnessed already in the extensive references to the Scot John Elder or when Chancellor quotes Richard Eden on Candy wines: “To be drunk among the Scythian snows in their native purity and pleasantness.”44 The list of gifts exchanged between the two monarchies is drawn unacknowledged directly from Richard Hakluyt.45 Diccon Chancellor mentions having read Pedro de Medina, despite his Arte de Navegar not having been translated until 1581 by the merchant John Frampton.46 It became one of the most influential navigational treatises of the sixteenth century. Lymond mentions the foundational writer on early modern Russia, Sigismund von Herberstein, repeatedly. His Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii (1549) was “the first accurate authentic and comprehensive ethnographic encyclopedia by an eyewitness about early 16th c. Russia… can be said to be almost singlehandedly responsible for the European image of Russia over several centuries” and was translated into English in 1555 in the context of the establishment of

43 Morrison, The Dorothy Dunnett Companion, 353. I would like to thank Deidre Serjeantson for sharing her unpublished essay on Dunnett, see below and footnote 55. 44 Deidre Serjeantson, “That Private Labyrinth: The Books That Made Lymond,” unpublished paper, kindly shared by the author, private communication. Dunnett, The Ringed Castle, 253. 45 Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (Edinburgh: E & C Goldsmid, 1886), vol. 3—Northeastern Europe and Adjacent Countries, Part II—The Muscovy Company and the Northeastern Passage, 150. 46 Pedro de Medina, The Art of Navigation, trans. John Frampton (London: Thomas Dawson, 1581).

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the Company.47 Sebastian Cabot’s central role in the foundation of the Muscovy Company is alluded to, while Lymond explains that Herberstein “left his writings, as Ibn-Fodhlan did six hundred years ago.”48 The casual reference to Ahmad Ibn-Fadlan is a tantalizing example of the collapsing of time in historical fiction, since the Baghdad ambassador’s full manuscript was not rediscovered until a thirteenth-century copy was identified in 1923. Lymond’s knowledge of Russia comes from the discarded writings of two of the most historically infamous travel writers on the pre-modern Rus. He alludes to barnacle geese and jumping through hoops with Laplanders, which Chancellor immediately recognizes as from Richard Eden, while Laps leave their wives with visiting merchants he draws from Herberstein.49 History is a patchwork of citation. The historical novelist celebrates material remains, while the historian weeps over them. For the writer they give shapes for the imagination to work on, while the historian sees only the blank spaces of loss. The fact that Dunnett’s novel set in Muscovy has been turned into a travel guidebook reflects this interest in cultural heritage, remains, architecture and art, embodied history.50 Reference to the fifteenth-century icon painter Andrei Rublev’s fresco of “three almond-eyed angels seated at Abraham’s table,” restored to the Troitsa Cathedral from the State Treyakov Gallery in Moscow where it was taken after the revolution, exemplifies historical fiction’s power to undo the ravages of history, to restore the past to what it should be, rescue it from the endless process of its making and

47 See the excellent introduction by Rima Greenhill, “Rebus Moscoviticarum Commentarii,” Reading East: Irish Sources and Resources, University College Dublin: https://www. ucd.ie/readingeast/essay7.html [Last accessed: 2 March 2021]. A delightful image of King Sigismund I of Poland was included in the first edition: https://www.britishmuseum.org/ collection/object/P_1848-1209-46 [Last accessed: 26 February 2021]. Medina is referred to on 264. 48 Dunnett, The Ringed Castle, 255. 49 Dunnett, The Ringed Castle, 332. See Richard Eden, The Decades of the Newe Worlde

or West India… (London: William Powell for Edward Sutton, 1555) and Sigmund Herberstein, Rerum Moscovitarum commentarii. In his comentariis sparsim contenta habebis russie, et que nunc eius metropolis est, moscouie brevissimam descriptionem. De religione quoque varia inserta sunt corographiam denique totius imperii mosici quis denique modus excpiendi et tractandi oratores: dissertitur. Itineraria quoque duo, in moscouiam sunt aiuncta (Wien: heirs of Johann Singriener, 1549). 50 Carole Richardson, Russia: The Dorothy Dunnett Guide (Edinburgh: The Dorothy Dunnett Society, 2020).

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unmaking.51 Her picture of Russia is a history lesson, giving life to important courtiers like Alexei Adashev and picaresquely, Lymond’s antagonist at the court of Ivan, Dmytro Vyshnevetsky, the Cossack Hetman who led a series of raids in 1556 against the Crimean Tartars’ Khanate. The restless errancy of her protagonist reflects her own love of travel, with the novel functioning as a kind of Grand Tour. There is no doubt that Dunnett’s erudition is not toned down, rather it is constantly foregrounded by her fiction. The attention to place and geography underlines again the secular and materialist nature of the novel’s vision and its fascination with trade and travel. Mary’s reign is important because of innovations like the foundation of England’s first joint stock company. Beyond atmosphere and setting, characters themselves are enmeshed in politics visible only with this hindsight, suggesting the availability of a clairvoyant understanding of the world, a sharing of the temporality of the novelist and reader. The Lithuanian soldier, Aleksandre, who has attempted to assassinate Crawford, explains his motivation: “Emperor Charles is dying, leaving one inadequate son tied to Mary of England,” the implication being he will be too weak to defend Lithuania from the Tsar’s expansionist ambitions, defending the commercial interests of the Hanse merchants whose trade depended on the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth.52 This represents a remarkable democratization of the possibilities for intervention in the period’s geo-politics. On the other hand, referring to Charles V sitting “in the small Brussels house in the park [an ironic reference to the Koudenberg Palace]… listening to the night-long ticking tread of his clocks,” the narrative domesticates and humanizes the grand, tying the era’s state of the art technology to commonplace contemporary experience. After this vignette, the narrative shifts immediately to quote Cardinal Reginald Pole’s Latin greeting to Mary I on his return from exile, echoing the Annunciation and mass: “Benedicta inter mulieres, the new Papal Legate had said, et benedictus fructus ventris tui.”53 The novel assumes familiarity with history and multiple languages. The creeping “tread” of time again hints at the moribund and outdated, in contrast to the novel’s foregrounding of the proto-modern cartography, navigation, military 51 Dunnett, The Ringed Castle, 158 and Richardson, Russia: The Dorothy Dunnett Guide, 58. 52 Dunnett, The Ringed Castle, 280 and 283. 53 Dunnett, The Ringed Castle, 87. There is another reference to Charles V’s clocks on

422.

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technology, and trade, emblematized by Lymond’s modernizing mission in Russia alongside the scenes with John Dee, Richard Chancellor, Sir Henry Sidney, and others. Before Mary reinstated it, the abolition of the Steelyard monopoly had caused German steel prices to rocket, undermining Russian’s military expansion and potential threat to the Hanse merchants and Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth. The narrative notes that the Muscovy Company’s “members comprised half the Government” and two of its prominent investors were William Cecil and Sir Henry Sidney.54 As well as underlining the implication of courtly elites in many early navigational and mercantile enterprises, this reinforces the interpenetration of economics and politics palpable in the attempt to export weapons to support Ivan’s wars against the Tatar khanate around which the English part of the plot turns. Despite the novel’s extraordinary substructure of historical knowledge and research, as fiction the narrative consistently elides fact and invention, alluding to a “Crown stripped of its church lands, poor though it was: [and the] Queen’s own laborious translation of Erasmus burned at her confessor’s suggestion,” a reference to the Udall Paraphrases published in 1548, an ahistorical example of censorship.55 Although the presentation of Mary may be ultimately conservative and reflective of early twentieth-century narrative history, its location in the mouths of particular characters, figures hostile or antipathetic to her reign moderates and subtly calls into question her representation through novelistic subjectivization and situatedness. The clearest example of Dunnett’s use of this dissonance is the novel’s implication in feminist history. A contrast between Russia and England is drawn in relation to commonplace tropes of barbarity, deriving from the earliest travel writing on the duchy, with the ambassador Nepeja, despite his relatively modest status, reflecting on the lack of abasement and falling to knees as he processes through London: “what would you expect, under the

54 Dunnett, The Ringed Castle, 429. 55 Dunnett, The Ringed Castle, 109. An extraordinary example of the depth of this

knowledge is having Sir William Petre refer to the personal Papal Bull confirming him in his possession of monastic land, ibid., 441, see F. G. Emmison, Tudor Secretary: Sir William Petre at Court and at Home (London: Longmans, 1961), 185. Mary’s translation appeared in Erasmus Desiderius, The First Tome or Volume of the Paraphrase Upon the Newe Testamente (London: Edward Whitchurch, 1548).

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ignorant rule of a woman?”56 Lymond comments on Russia elsewhere that it is “a culture wholly intolerant of gynarchy. They don’t know what they are missing.”57 His comment, even if ironic, reflecting on the powerful women in his life, from his unfaithful mother, lover Güzel to his antagonist, the Countess of Lennox, highlights the sexism of the period. Philippa alludes in passing to the decline in the wool trade in the 1550s, excitement about the Russian Company’s enterprise opening up an alternative route to China and the Far East as well as new markets in Muscovy, Mary worrying about Philip departing as soon as a baby was born, taxation in the Netherlands, Peruvian treasure, and being dragged into a war with the French despite the marriage contract.58 A deep understanding of the marriage contract apparent from its clauses relating to inheritance is also signaled by a passing allusion to “per verba de praesenti.”59 This sticking point in the negotiations reflected Spanish concerns about venturing to the barbarian north without the protection of Philip already being king.60 When Chancellor reflects that no one speaks English in Russia, he immediately concedes “But who could speak English in Antwerp?”61 On arrival back on British shores, Lymond and his brother discuss the political situation, the defensive alliance of the French with Paul IV, “the Caraffa, who is eighty years old and loathes Spaniards,” quoting his very words, “the scum of the earth… the spawn of Jews and Moors,” while Philip “this sluggish inexperienced Prince” has taken over following Charles’ abdication, while in terms of religion the “burnings go on. Mostly of theologians or people of humble position: the rest were given early warning to fly off to Geneva or Strasburg.”62 His brother continues at “the same time, thirteen hundred Lutherans and Anabaptists have been cremated in Holland.”63 This foreshadows the tendency

56 Dunnett, The Ringed Castle, 398. 57 Dunnett, The Ringed Castle, 237. 58 Dunnett, The Ringed Castle, 103–4. 59 Dunnett, The Ringed Castle, 420. 60 On this question see the discussion of the marriage contract in my Mary and Philip:

The Marriage of Tudor England and Habsburg Spain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020), Chapter 2: Contracting Matrimony, 52–81. 61 Dunnett, The Ringed Castle, 146. 62 Dunnett, The Ringed Castle, 365. See my Mary and Philip, 56 and footnote 28. 63 Dunnett, The Ringed Castle, 366.

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to understand the burnings in comparative terms, looking at religious persecution across the sixteenth century in England but more importantly Europe. The Lymonds continue to discuss the lack of an heir and the consequent acceleration of plans for Elizabeth’s marriage, to the Duke of Savoy or Archduke Ferdinand. Subsequently Dee and Lymond discuss the refusal of Savoy’s proposal, with Dee averring anachronistically “the Queen dare not go too far against public opinion.”64 Mary probably resented more the prestige and recognition it conferred on her troublesome sibling. The internationalism of Mary and Philip’s court and Habsburg investment in England are perhaps best exemplified by the visit alluded to of the Duchesses of Parma, illegitimate daughter of Charles V, and Lorraine, Christina of Denmark, Philip’s cousin, who the text suggests Mary did not like, based perhaps on a distant memory of her refusal of her father, Henry VIII.65 To some extent Mary and Philip’s court provides a broad canvass for Dunnett to consider one of the most mysterious parts of Europe, Russia. Her historical cast is vast, taking in everyone from Roger Ascham to Johannes Sturm and a large proportion of the names from the crew lists of the three Muscovy Company ships featured in Hakluyt and discussed by Willan.66 At times the novels appear deliberately to taunt the historian, with palimpsests, ghostly appearances of characters, and historical traces lifted from other periods. Sir William Garrard, mayor of London in 1555 and a major backer of the Russian expeditions, discusses navigators with Lymond in the wake of Richard Chancellor’s drowning and throws out the name Roger Bodenham, “too old, and settled in 64 Dunnett, The Ringed Castle, 404–5. 65 Dunnett, The Ringed Castle, 450. 66 The historical figures who appear in the pages of the novel: Susan Clarencius “old

mistress Clarenceux too simple” (94), Ruy Gomez de Silva (102), Pierre Gilles and André Thevet (256), Hans Eworth (316), John Cheke (327), Gerardus Mercator (327), Stephen Borough (335), Thomas Wharton (384), Edward Courtney (393), Anthony Browne, Viscount Montague (398), John Dee (402 ff.) referring to lectures on Euclid delivered in Rheims, Leonard Digges (408), Nicholas Heath, Archbishop of York (429), William Paulet, Lord High Treasurer (429), Margaret Douglas (433), Henry Darnley (434), Thomas Thirlby, Bishop of Ely (436) and Philip blocking his promotion to Lord Chancellor on Gardiner’s death (441), John Dimmock (438), Cardinal Pole (447), Sir Henry Sidney (452), the Count of Feria and Jane Dormer (457), Nicholas Udall and William Baldwin (466), Thomas Stafford (486), Henry Jerningham (514), the Earl of Arundel (515), Juan de Figueroa (529). This is by no means a definitive list and many appear multiple times of course.

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Spain.”67 Is this the same Sir Roger Bodenham who commissioned the Rotherwas Room completed in 1611, currently in the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College in Massachusetts? The novels are puzzles, mysteries, presenting collages of historical elements some of which belong, others might belong, but others still might not.68 The concatenation of disparate elements may suggest on one level the insignificance of chronology and the extraneous nature of historical detail to understanding how the past produces the present. On the other hand, these time-slips underline the fictive nature of the narrative, suggesting historicity is just a form of imaginative play, a search for shifting patterns and connections among inchoate, uncanny elements. Cosmopolitan interest in the early modern period and its sites of preservation, from across Europe, is reflected in the restless mobility of the novels, their settings shifting from France to Venice to Constantinople and Moscow. It is precisely the decentered perspective of retelling sixteenth-century European history from a Scottish point of view that gives her work its enduring fascination, its resistance to historiographical vagaries. Was the announcement at the end of my book on Mary and Philip that the reign’s historiography would go on inflecting the internationalism or parochialism dominant in English politics a “back to the future” moment, something already foreshadowed in the lateral perspectives of Dunnett’s novels?69 It heralded as futurity, something that has already happened, from the papistical writings of the first postemancipation historians more than a century and a half ago to historical fiction of the 1970s. Lisa Hopkins has argued that in Dunnett “Scotland is seen not as a small and geographically isolated northern country but as a lively and thriving part of a wider European culture”: “To articulate this vision of Scotland’s future she needed to return to the past.”70 She concludes that the novels attempt to convey a sense of the past as

67 Dunnett, The Ringed Castle, 401. 68 The depth of readerly curiosity about distinguishing historical and fictional is

apparent from sites like the Fandom wiki: https://dunnett.fandom.com/wiki/Compan ion_entries_for_The_Ringed_Castle. 69 See my Mary and Philip: The Marriage of Tudor England and Habsburg Spain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020), 225. 70 Lisa Hopkins, “Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond and Niccolò Series: History Versus Experience,” Working Papers on the Web 9 (2006). https://extra.shu.ac.uk/wpw/historici sing/HopkinsL.htm [Last accessed: 2 March 2021].

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a form of the present, something that leads to increasing anachronism such as Ascham’s awareness of the population of London. The novels, Hopkins argues, proffer a vision in which the individual is unimportant (many are lost unsentimentally along the way), while being simultaneously disinterested in major public events. Notable is the absence of religious controversy and religion itself from both plot and character, something enforced by the absence of interest in the spiritual. John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments appears to be a notable absence, although this may reflect a separate Presbyterian tradition. The difference of the past reminds us of our presentness.71 So while the novels are imbued with the culture of the period, it is their literary, artistic, architectural, scientific, and cartographic achievements that are foregrounded, rather than its religious reformations. In a recent The Conversation article Diana Wallace alludes to this asserting that “Dunnett traces the beginnings of the modern world in the building of nation-states and the development of new art and culture.”72 Although we may worry that our concerns are overly presentist, equally it might be that we are constantly blinded to the innumerable revivals, losses, and forgettings that have already made history inaccessible to us, filtered constantly through the bedrock of successive presents. Dunnett’s fiction with its particular investments foregrounds aspects of the past, such as the transnational nature of culture or the presence of women, which have become increasingly central concerns, even as it marginalizes others. The historical novel exposes perhaps at its best the discontinuous fortunes of supposedly vexed questions from the image of Mary I to say the visibility/invisibility of women’s writing, art, or political contributions—the ways in which our knowledge of particular pasts ebb and flow. More significantly it is able to compensate for the past, exorcize our haunted present, by reinserting it back in the past. With Philippa, Margaret Douglas, Mary herself, and Güzel among others, we 71 de Groot, The Historical Novel, 3. 72 Diana Wallace, “Five Historical Romances to Escape into During a Pandemic,” The

Conversation, 28 October 2020: https://theconversation.com/five-historical-romancesto-escape-into-during-a-pandemic-148827 [Last accessed: May 21, 2021]. See her The Woman’s Historical Novel: British Women Writers, 1900–2000 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), esp. Chapter 7—“Selling Women’s History: Popular Historical Fiction in the 1970s,” 150–75. See also Jenna Barlow, “Women’s Historical Fiction ‘After’ Feminism: Discursive Reconstructions of the Tudors in Contemporary Literature,” Unpublished Doctoral Thesis, Stellenbosch University, 2014.

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encounter a growing investment in feminist histories by according agency to women in the stories and increasingly emphasizing the misogyny they face. A clue to Dunnett’s prescience in her depiction of Mary may be gleaned from Cleo McNelly Kearns’ analysis of her “Dubious Pleasures: Dorothy Dunnett and the Historical Novel”: her historical novels provide “a love of country that does not fall into nationalist nostalgia and an insistence on a grasp of international forces that nevertheless retains a concern for justice, tolerance, freedom and cultural particularity at the local level as well.”73 So the dissonance in Dunnett’s representation of Mary, both the familiar bloody and tragic figure of legend and at the same time hard-working, humorous sole queen, emerges from the tension between a pro-European, cosmopolitan project, focused heavily on shared material remains, a cultural heritage transcending nation if not locale, and the misogynist, sectarian and parochial histories of Mary I and her reign inherited from the nineteenth century and channeled through early twentieth-century historians, whose picture while increasingly recognizing her achievements, still cast her as tragic and unwanted by husband or people. For historians, gaps in the historical record are limits, signs of the incompleteness and loss for which their narratives offer reparation and compensation. They indicate not just what is not known, but what can never be known, the irreparable absences of the archive. It confronts us with our congenital archive fever.74 For writers of historical fiction, the same gaps that bring historians up short, forcing them to confront the inadequacies of their referent, are what make their fictionalizing work possible. Both historian and author fill the gaps, but they are filled in entirely different modes, historians forging rational, etiological bridges that link fragments in logical metonymic chains, while writers elaborate imaginatively, improvising in these open spaces.75 The discontinuous

73 Cleo McNelly Kearns, “Dubious Pleasure: Dorothy Dunnett and the Historical Novel,” Critical Review 32 (1990), 36–48, 47. 74 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Archive fever, the death drive, consignation, impression in both senses of the word are all useful for thinking about historical fiction. 75 Hilary Mantel’s excellent reflections on these themes were set out in her Reith Lectures: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08vkm52/episodes/guide [Last accessed: 20 May 2021].

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employment of historiography and sources could be seen as liberating, not tying research to the idea of the most recent being the most important, but an embracing of creative anachronism. At the heart of historical fiction as a form is the negotiation of anachronism, whether that is the realist writing of historical subjects with the otherness of history relegated to the setting and backdrop or generic hybridity of for example situating crime fiction historically. Stories or subjects can be anachronistic. Dunnett’s novels retain something of the pedantry of the historian, in their attention to the detail of material remains. One problem for the novel is that in their pastiche of historical texts, they inevitably reproduce the dullness of heaped up details, whose significance in terms of hierarchy and status then, mean nothing to us. It is this delicate balancing act between enriching, didactic reference to the archival and the museum and the dynamic of plumbing the depths of a mysterious, ineluctable subjectivity. Like mosaics, often we have fragments of information, tantalizing, suggestive, but incomplete, partial, indecisive, the novelist is able to put these pieces of the puzzle to work suggesting on one level that history’s remains must be significant. As Jerome de Groot has argued: “Scholarly work regularly ignores the contribution to the historical imaginary and to popular historiography of the swathe of films, television, and books representing and versioning the past. It is unusual to come across work that seeks to comprehend the historical and historiographical work being done by textual iterations outside the academy.”76 In numerous places, de Groot refers to the realist mode, dominant in historical writing, not just as a stylistic choice but a structuring and determining reflection of the epistemological concerns and limits of the form. While McNelly Kearns argues the interplay between fantasy and “the reality effect” troubles the “non-reciprocal relation between present and past and the immutability of events” and allows Dunnett to explore counterfactuals, casting history

76 Jerome de Groot, Remaking History: The Past in Contemporary Historical Fictions (London: Routledge, 2016), 7. There is a growing bibliography on this topic. See for example: Laure Finke and Martin Schichtman, “No Pain, No Gain: Violence as Symbolic Capital in Malory’s Morte d’Arthur,” Arthuriana 8 (1998), 115–34; Robert Toplin and Jason Eudy, “The Historian Encounters Film: A Historiography,” Organization of American Historians Magazine of History 16 (2002), 7–12; Robert Rosenstone, “Inventing Historical Truth on the Silver Screen,” Cinéaste 29 (2004), 29–33; Alison Landsberg, Engaging the Past: Mass Culture and the Production of Historical Knowledge (New York: Columbia UP, 2015); Alan Munslow, A History of History (London: Routledge, 2012); and Beverley Southgate, History Meets Fiction (London: Routledge, 2014).

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as an “endless open set [of possibilities], with numerous alternatives at every point of decision.”77 The Dorothy Dunnett Society’s motto is “History and literature together as one.” It is more though that history is always written in the shadow of the imaginative play of the literary, while literature depends on the fixed reference points of historicity. Dunnett’s interview in Publishers Weekly suggested that “her readership seems to be largely female, the books offering strong plots and absorbing worlds into which to escape.”78 A feature picked up in McNelly Kearns’ suggestion that “historical novels confer precisely that degree of escape from reality through the dream of power…. [they] console those confined to the private sphere and help them imagine how power and fame… feel.”79 The gender inflections of her open histories, however, and with it her complex picture of Mary I, her reign and the period, reveal the complexity and importance of her historical fiction to the work of historiography, taking the reader far beyond sex and swords.

77 McNelly Kearns, “Dubious Pleasure: Dorothy Dunnett and the Historical Novel,”

46. 78 Richardson, “Dorothy Dunnett: An Historical Pageant,” 47. 79 McNelly Kearns, “Dubious Pleasure: Dorothy Dunnett and the Historical Novel,”

36.

Still Bloody Mary: Mary I in Historical Fiction Stephanie Russo

The posthumous reputation of Mary I has always suffered by comparison to her sister and heir, Elizabeth I. Whereas Elizabeth’s reign is characterized as England’s Golden Age, Mary’s reign is frequently portrayed in historical fiction as a chaotic and violent period, presided over by an increasingly fanatical and delusional Queen. It might be presumed, however, that the opportunity provided by fiction to imagine the interiority of Mary I might produce a more nuanced and humane vision of one of history’s most maligned queens. Further, Mary should have an obvious appeal for writers of women’s historical fiction, as the first queenregnant of England. However, despite recent attempts by historians to reassess her reign, the fictional Mary I is still persistently represented in historical fiction as a failed religious obsessive, driven to violence through 1 See, for instance: Linda Porter, Mary Tudor: The First Queen (London: Piatkus, 2007); Anna Whitelock, Mary Tudor: England’s First Queen (London: Bloomsbury, 2009); Sarah Duncan, “‘Bloody’ Mary? Changing Perceptions of England’s First Ruling Queen,” in The Name of a Queen: William Fleetwood’s Itinerarium de Windsor, ed. Charles Beem and Dennis Moore (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 175–91.

S. Russo (B) Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 V. Schutte and J. S. Hower (eds.), Writing Mary I, Queenship and Power, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95132-0_10

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sexual frustration, infertility, and jealousy.1 A survey of twentieth and twenty-first-century historical fictions about Mary demonstrates that the Mary of contemporary historical fiction remains the Bloody Mary—or the sad and lonely victim—of popular legend. The apparent resistance to adopting new ways of thinking about Mary is partly accounted for by the perception that it was Elizabeth who embodied proto-feminist power and agency, and that Mary was the negative exemplar whom Elizabeth defined herself against. There is also an inherent difficulty in conforming the shape of Mary’s biography to the demands of fiction that historians have not quite been able to overcome; Mary’s story lacks a convincing romance, for instance, or a glorious moment of triumph. Historical fiction, then, has remained rather static and schematized, giving certain problematic assumptions about Mary—the perception that her reign was a total failure—the status of truisms. The twentieth century has often been associated with the rise of the women’s historical novel. While historical novels written by and about women were not new, the twentieth century saw an ever-expanding market for women’s historical fiction; a market in which novels about queens dominated. As Diana Wallace has argued, “it was after the First World War that British women, entering into history as enfranchised citizens for the first time, turned to the historical novel in substantial numbers and reshaped it in forms which expressed and answered their needs and desires.”2 The women’s historical novel foregrounded the domestic lives of women, and gave “the concerns of the so-called private sphere the status and interest of history.”3 Novelists such as Jean Plaidy, Anya Seton, Margaret Irwin, and Margaret Campbell Barnes dramatized the lives of medieval and early modern queens, with Anne Boleyn and Elizabeth I being by far the most popular subjects, largely due to the inherent drama and romance found in their biographies.4 Mary often plays a secondary role in novels about other Tudor queens; most frequently, she is featured in those about Elizabeth I. However, in this chapter I focus on twentieth and twenty-first-century historical novels in 2 Diana Wallace, The Woman’s Historical Novel: British Women Writers, 1900–2000 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 25. 3 Alison Light, “‘Young Bess’: Historical Novels and Growing Up,” Feminist Review 33 (1989): 59 (57–71). 4 Stephanie Russo, The Afterlife of Anne Boleyn: Representations of Anne Boleyn in Fiction and on the Screen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).

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which her story is foregrounded, of which there are comparatively few.5 The relative lack of novels about Mary, at least in comparison to novels about other Tudor women, can partly be explained by reference to her biography. Mary’s reign lacks a narrative of triumph, at least after she had claimed the throne from Lady Jane Grey; her Counter-Reformation was unsuccessful, she failed to bear an heir, and she lost the English territory of Calais. It is difficult to point to a particularly glorious dramatic moment that compares to Elizabeth’s Tilbury speech or the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Courtship is an important feature of the woman’s historical novel, and Mary’s life rather lacked a satisfying romance. Her relationship with her husband Philip is usually characterized as one-sided; in all the novels examined here, it is presumed that Philip had no interest at all in his love-struck wife. In her work on historical fiction about Charles II’s mistress, Nell Gwyn, Julie Novak argues that the generic requirement for a happy ending in a romance novel places the historical romance novelist in a difficult position; in other words, there is an inherent and irresolvable conflict between biography and the demands of genre.6 The hesitancy about casting Mary’s life as a romance is partly accounted for by the historical fact that Philip did leave his wife to pursue other political interests, but also perhaps reflects a troubling internalized misogyny: the belief that a younger, handsome prince could not possibly love or desire his older wife. Her life is thus more challenging as subject matter for the historical novel than that of other Tudor queens.

The Bloody Mary Myth The presumption that Mary I was essentially both a failed queen and failed woman is pervasive and has colored her afterlife in both fiction and non-fiction. As Thomas S. Freeman writes, “the myth of ‘Bloody Mary’ is like a shadow: dark, without substance, and apparently destined to follow its subject, England’s first sovereign queen, forever.”7 The persistence of 5 I have also excluded representations of Mary Tudor on the screen; it is useful to

note, however, that Mary usually appears as a side character in films and television shows centered on the other women in her life. 6 Julia Novak, “Nell Gwyn in Contemporary Romantce Novels: Biography and the Dictates of ‘Genre Literature,’” Contemporary Women’s Writing 8, no. 3 (2014): 373–90. 7 Thomas S. Freeman, “Inventing Bloody Mary: Perceptions of Mary Tudor from the Restoration to the Twentieth Century,” in Mary Tudor: Old and New Perspectives, ed.

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the mythology that has accrued around Mary might be accounted for by the old adage that history is written by the victors; Mary’s CounterReformation failed, and so there is little wonder that Protestant England has not looked back upon its last Catholic queen kindly. John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments , first published in 1563 and colloquially known as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs , was central to the formation of the Bloody Mary myth, although he did not use this phrase and the mythology of “Bloody Mary” accreted over centuries. As Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman have shown, Foxe provides a list of the “disasters, real and alleged” of Mary’s reign: “the failure to have Philip crowned, the loss of Calais, the lack of an heir, Philp’s putative abandonment of the queen and her sudden death, and presented them as punishments inflected on her by God.”8 However, as Freeman writes, “instead of being forged in the dying embers of Smithfield, the myth originated in the constitutional turmoil of the late seventeenth century.”9 In particular, negative representations of Mary in the late seventeenth century were associated with the Exclusion Crisis: the attempt to exclude the Catholic Duke of York from acceding the throne as James II. By the nineteenth century, the “Bloody Mary” moniker was “a historical commonplace.”10 The myth of Bloody Mary has become so pervasive that it has sometimes been associated with the supernatural. The ritual by which you are supposed to be able to summon the spirit of “Bloody Mary” by saying her name into a mirror a number of times has intermittently been linked to Mary I. One of the novels examined here, Julianne Lee’s Her Mother’s Daughter (2009), commences with a group of girls engaging in just such a ritual; they unknowingly successfully conjure up Mary, who then tells her story for the rest of the novel.11 However, any association between this piece of supernatural folklore and Mary I is largely a result of confusion and reflects the uncertain origins of the ritual. Alan Dundes attributes Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 78 (78– 99). 8 Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman, “Introduction,” in Mary Tudor: Old and New Perspectives, ed. Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 9 (1–17). 9 Freeman, “Inventing Bloody Mary,” 78. 10 Freeman, “Inventing Bloody Mary,” 86. 11 Julianne Lee, Her Mother’s Daughter: A Novel of Mary Tudor (New York: Berkley Books, 2009), 1–6.

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the confusion to the symbolic resonances between blood loss and decapitation as a metaphor for virginity loss, and the fate of Mary Queen of Scots—a basic confusion, then, about which Mary is “Bloody” Mary.12 However, the Marian persecutions of Protestants have meant that Mary I has been unable to escape the taint of monstrousness, and so despite the potential origins of the legend, it is now presumed that Mary I was uniquely “bloody.” The prevalence of the Bloody Mary mythology does not mean, however, that all historians and novelists have represented Mary as a violent and delusional woman. One of the most significant attempts to challenge negative perceptions about Mary in the nineteenth century was written by Agnes and Elizabeth Strickland. Their biography of Mary— written by Elizabeth but attributed to Agnes—in Lives of the Queens of England emphasized Mary’s positive qualities: her charity, kindness, and delicacy, for instance. Mary’s persecution of Protestants was accounted for by shifting blame onto her advisors, and by reference to her frequent ill health. At the end of her biography, Elizabeth Strickland wrote that Mary “mingled some of the virtues of her sex, with those dark and stormy passions which have been attributed to her.”13 Judith M. Richards writes that “Strickland’s aim was to balance the unqualified disapproval so frequently directed at Mary’s reign, while acknowledging the impact of her assaults on Protestantism.”14 Mary was not a “bad” woman, but instead a victim of her circumstances, which had the effect of encouraging all her worst urges. The Stricklands’ biographies of royal women had a pervasive influence on historical novelists of the twentieth century, both because they were writing about the lives of women at a time when relatively few historians were doing so, and because the domestic focus of their biographies provided plenty of material for novels about the private lives of queens. Indeed, the assumption that Mary’s essential goodness was warped and soured by misfortunes, and by the actions of others, including her husband and her advisers, has become part of the Bloody Mary legend, and is consistently reiterated in historical fictions to this day. 12 Alan Dundes, “Bloody Mary in the Mirror: A Ritual Reflection of Pre-Pubescent Anxiety,” Western Folklore 57, no. 2/3 (1998): 127 (119–35). 13 Agnes Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England, from the Normal Conquest, Vol. V (London: Henry Colburn, 1845), 441. 14 Judith M. Richards, “Defaming and Defining ‘Bloody Mary’ in Nineteenth-Century England,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 90, no. 1 (2014): 295 (287–303).

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The persistence of these beliefs about Mary perhaps reflects the demands of the market for historical fiction. Novelists know that certain ideas about Mary I have been commonly accepted by readers of historical fiction, and so aim to give their readers what they expect: a story about a sad, failed queen who ultimately gave way to a much more successful queen. As Linda Porter writes, however, the tendency of these texts to “depict her as a sad little woman who would have been better off as the Tudor equivalent of a housewife is almost as distasteful as the legend of Bloody Mary.”15

Mary and Her Misfortunes Following the Stricklands’ reinterpretation of Mary as a good, albeit flawed woman, Hilda Prescott’s 1940 biography of Mary was central in the reframing of Mary as a tragic victim of unfortunate circumstances. In this reading of Mary’s character, all her actions are colored by the various griefs and misfortunes she suffered, stemming from the moment when her father decided to annul his marriage to her mother. Prescott was largely following the nineteenth-century historian A.F. Pollard in her presentation of a grief-stricken Mary, but Prescott has been more influential than Pollard on women’s historical fiction in her emphasis on the impact of Mary’s marriage on her reign. For Prescott, the loss of Philip was the final humiliation for Mary; the conviction that Mary had a slavish love for Philip is a fundamental assumption of nearly all the historical fiction that comes after Prescott’s biography. Prescott’s assessment of Mary’s reign is also bleak: “Perhaps no other reign in English history has seen such a great endeavour made and so utterly defeated. All that Mary did was undone, all she intended utterly unfulfilled.”16 As Freeman writes, ultimately Prescott represents Mary as a “Mary Magdalen figure, needing to repent, not her personal sins, but her wrongheaded policies.”17 Prescott’s Mary is sympathetic, as her life has been so unremittingly unhappy, but her mistakes are the unfortunate consequence of a life marked by abandonment and loneliness.

15 Porter, Mary Tudor: The First Queen, 418. 16 H.F.M. Prescott, Mary Tudor: The Spanish Tudor (London: Phoenix, 2012), Kindle

edition, location 9548. 17 Freeman, “Inventing Bloody Mary,” 99.

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Hilda Lewis’s lengthy three-volume series of historical novels about the life of Mary Tudor was clearly shaped by Prescott’s view of Mary as a tragic victim.18 Lewis exhaustively catalogued a litany of misfortunes that blighted Mary’s life; only Mary’s very earliest years were anything approaching happy. Mary is especially preoccupied with her hatred of Anne Boleyn, who she sees as “shadowing” her life.19 She dwells obsessively throughout the first novel, I Am Mary Tudor (1971), over her hatred for Anne and resentment at the way she has been treated, and this sense of grievance comes to shape her character. Even when good things happen to Mary, they are quickly followed by more uncertainty: her reconciliation with her father is unstable, her reign is troubled, and her love for Philip is entirely one-sided. Her life is characterized by loneliness, anxiety, and disappointment; a “life lived in fear and the shadow of death.”20 The narrative pattern of Lewis’s trilogy is to leave Mary in a state of hopeful expectation at the end of the first two novels, only for that hope to be dashed immediately at the start of the next volume. At the end of I Am Mary Tudor, Mary has finally claimed her throne, only to find almost immediately in Mary The Queen (1973) that her kingdom is hopelessly divided, and that female rule is far more complicated than she ever anticipated. The use of first-person narration throughout the trilogy underlines how difficult Mary finds queenship: on the very first page of Mary the Queen, she predicts her early death, as “incessant threat and fear, together with ill-health, does not make for a long life.”21 At the end of Mary the Queen, she is rapturously in love with her husband and believes she is about to give birth, only to discover in Bloody Mary (1975) that her husband cares very little for her and that her pregnancy is a delusion. She persists in her determination to marry Philip despite warnings from her councilors that the people will not accept such a match, and, sure enough, the people turn against her.22 She transfers her paranoia over

18 Prescott’s biography is the most recent text on a list of sources cited at the end of I Am Mary Tudor, reflecting that text’s status as the standard biography of Mary I for decades after it was written. 19 Hilda Lewis, I Am Mary Tudor (London: Arrow Books, 1971), 55. 20 Lewis, I Am Mary Tudor, 287. 21 Hilda Lewis, Mary the Queen (London: Arrow Books, 1975), 9. 22 Lewis, Mary the Queen, 206.

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Anne Boleyn to paranoia over Elizabeth and is distressed to find that her religious reforms alienate her from her people. The final blow is the loss of Calais: “With Calais,” Mary reflects, “I had lost the last of my people’s love.”23 Mary’s life is a sad catalogue of failure after failure; hope always followed closely by despair. Mary herself describes her life as a “long, dark tunnel.”24 Lewis’ trilogy, like Prescott’s biography, is mostly sympathetic to Mary, and ends with a eulogy to Mary’s dedication to her religious cause, but she is ultimately pitiable, weak and misguided; hardly a queen to be inspired by. Jean Plaidy’s In the Shadow of the Crown (1989) similarly represents Mary as a tragic, delusional figure, in line with representations of the queen as a melancholic and misguided woman. Plaidy was one of the twentieth century’s most prolific and popular historical novelists. As Wallace has highlighted, Plaidy’s novels “demonstrate that it is a matter of historical fact that women have been locked up, mistreated, violently abused, raped, and even killed, often by their husbands.”25 The Mary of In the Shadow of the Crown accordingly is persistently a victim of men. Her childhood happiness is destroyed by her father, and her husband neglects and lies to her. On her death bed, Mary gives a frank assessment of her life and reign: “There was disaster everywhere. Calais lost, and my people and my husband deserting me. My friends were dying round me. What had I to live for? Only the child which I deceived myself into thinking I carried in my womb. I had to. It was my only reason for living.”26 She realizes that her husband had never loved her, and increasingly regrets her campaign of violence against Protestants, especially as she comes to the gradual realization that the public execution of men such as Cranmer had the effect of turning the populace against her. The implication here is that Mary’s regret is only partial, as she only comes to regret her choice to use violence when she realizes that the effect on her religious reforms is counter-productive. Losing Calais is also directly attributed to the suffering that Mary endured at the hands of her

23 Hilda Lewis, Bloody Mary (London: Arrow Books, 1975), 190. 24 Lewis, Bloody Mary, 235. 25 Wallace, The Woman’s Historical Novel, 137. 26 Jean Plaidy, In the Shadow of The Crown (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1989).

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husband: “I lost it because I wanted Philip. I wanted to please him…to keep him with me.”27 Plaidy’s novel also reflects the portrait of Mary given by Prescott. While Plaidy was writing forty years after the publication of Prescott’s biography, her reliance on that text is perhaps accounted for by her long career. Eleanor Hibbert, writing under the pseudonym Jean Plaidy, had been writing Tudor historical fiction since the 1940s, and had already covered most of the material in In the Shadow of the Crown in other novels. By the 1980s, her Tudor historical fiction was largely reiterating stories she had already written in other forms, although with a shift made from the thirdperson narration characteristic of her earlier career into the first-person.28 Freeman notes that this vision of a Mary “warped by grief” reflects nineteenth-century understandings of gender: “women were more gentle and inherently virtuous than men, but they were also more passionate and their intellect was governed by their emotions.”29 Plaidy accordingly has Mary attribute her failures to her tendency to feel too much: “I cannot see where I could have acted differently, except perhaps in my emotions, my tendency—in love only—to look upon what should have been clear to me and distort it to fit my own needs and desires.”30 Plaidy thus replicates Lewis’s assessment of Mary’s character in I am Mary Tudor, reflecting the static nature of historical fictions about her: “I am a Tudor. I love and hate. And even now, though turned of forty and having learned many a hard lesson, I have never learned—either in love or hatred—to hide my heart.”31 Mary’s problem is inherent to her gender: she simply felt too deeply, and therefore allowed herself to be led astray by unscrupulous men who capitalized on her emotional weakness. However, Plaidy also draws attention to the way that gender shaped Mary’s reputation in a manner that gently pushes against that association of women with irrationality. Mary reflects that: “But how many more had suffered, and as cruelly, in my father’s reign? Yet no one had hurled abuse at him. He had sent them to their deaths because they disagreed with him; I had done so because

27 Plaidy, In the Shadow of the Crown, 386. 28 For more on the shift from third-person narration to third-person narration in

Plaidy’s novel, see: Russo, The Afterlife of Anne Boleyn, 199–204. 29 Freeman, “Inventing Bloody Mary,” 99. 30 Plaidy, In the Shadow of the Crown, 384. 31 Lewis, I Am Mary Tudor, 60.

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these victims had disagreed with God’s Holy Writ. Why should I be so stigmatised when none had questioned him?”32 However, comparatively little is done with this insight, which comes only a few pages before the end of the novel. Mary might feel momentarily aggrieved by the difference between her reputation and that of her father, but soon returns to blaming herself and her excessive emotions for her own failures. Plaidy therefore goes some way toward using a feminist consciousness to account for Mary’s alleged failures, even if Mary herself still assesses her reign in gendered terms. Other novels reiterate Mary’s status as a tragic victim. Philippa Gregory’s The Queen’s Fool represents Mary as a failed and pathetic figure. The novel’s narrator, Hannah Green, the “queen’s fool” of the title, reflects upon Mary’s life as she lays dying: Sadness had worn her away to dust that could blow away on the wind. I thought of her riding into London in her shabby red costume, her face bright with hope, and her courage when she took on the great men of the kingdom and beat them at their own game. I thought of her joy in her husband and her longing for a child to love, a son for England. I thought of her absolute devotion to the memory of her mother and her love of God.33

Hannah notes, however, that Elizabeth will be a better queen to England, because of her policy of religious tolerance: “She will teach the people of this country that each man and woman must consider his or her own conscience, must find their own way to God.”34 Mary is a good woman, but a failed queen due to her religious intolerance. Hannah, who is Jewish, concludes the novel looking forward to an era of religious freedom under Elizabeth. She also notes that she has observed how Mary “[broke] her heart for love.”35 Gregory thus repeats the assessment of both Lewis and Plaidy that Mary’s problem was that she loved too much, again reflecting the remarkable persistence of the view of Mary given in Prescott’s biography.

32 Plaidy, In the Shadow of the Crown, 383. 33 Philippa Gregory, The Queen’s Fool (London: HarperCollins, 2011), 483. 34 Gregory, The Queen’s Fool , 484. 35 Gregory, The Queen’s Fool , 488.

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Mary the Monster Other novels, however, move away from the tragic victim paradigm to represent Mary as a cruel and bigoted woman—the crazed “Bloody Mary” of the popular imagination. This shift may reflect a desire to represent a more agentic Mary: a Mary that is not simply a victim, but a woman who actively chooses to be cruel. Despite the rather lurid title, Mary is only a secondary character in Anne Stevens’ Bloody Mary: A Tale of Tudor Revenge (2019). However, anytime that Mary is discussed, she is described as a cruel, violent, delusional woman whose pregnancies are known by all to be figments of her imagination. Her husband despises her, and it is her disappointment over that relationship, as well as her delusions about being pregnant, that lead directly to her persecution of Protestants. In the final pages of the novel, Stevens argues that the moniker Bloody Mary was entirely deserved: With her determined insistence on a pregnancy that was a phantom, the queen’s mind would fast degenerate. Her devotion to Rome was corrupted by the urge to punish any who were heretics, and her reputation was soon to grow, like a cancer, to ruin England. In every corner of the land, men whispered about the queen’s obsessive wish to convert them back to Rome, and muttered the dreadful name she was earning so quickly…Bloody Mary.36

Not only is Mary’s reputation entirely deserved, Stevens suggests, there is no attempt made at all throughout the novel to attribute Mary’s failings as a monarch to her circumstances. She is simply a thoroughly evil woman whose reign causes nothing but suffering to her people. Stevens is perhaps attempting to write with a feminist consciousness here: instead of a victim who made mistakes because she was a weak woman, Stevens represents Mary as a bad ruler quite apart from her gender. As the title suggests, Suzannah Dunn’s The Queen’s Sorrow (2008) initially reads like another novel that frames Mary’s actions as the result of her tragic life. Mary is a rather pathetic, lonely figure, who constantly finds herself disappointed in love and abandoned. The novel largely turns on the supposed contrasts between the English and the Spanish.

36 Anne Stevens, Bloody Mary: A Tale of Tudor Revenge, Kindle edition (TightCircle Publications, 2019), 236.

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Mary’s marriage to a Spaniard is understood by the English as representing England’s submission to Spain and Spanish interests. Further, the marriage is accompanied by a rise in xenophobia against Spanish people: “Jack Spaniard…coming to rob the English of their livelihoods.”37 What happens, in fact, is that the Spanish Inquisition comes to England. Burning heretics is framed as a uniquely Spanish act, and Rafael, the novel’s focalizer, describes the assumed compliance of the English to Catholic ritual as ominous: “It was the sincerity that was the problem. The solemnity. Not English. The silence of a crowd, a kneeling crowd, Rafael knew only too well from Spain, where the Inquisition had been the teacher of it.”38 The English, as Rafael’s love interest informs him, have no real interest in religious schism: “No one here’s a Catholic. In England, Rafael…no one cares. God is God, and, beyond that, no one cares.”39 The belief that the English are religiously ambivalent is one that is often replicated in Mary Tudor novels as an explanation for the failure of her religious reforms. Dunn implies that Mary is out of step with her people in her religious ardor, and that this fundamental misunderstanding of her people partly accounts for her failure as queen. Dunn’s portrait of a deeply bigoted Spain, as opposed to tolerant England, is obviously problematic. Historians have challenged the belief that Mary was encouraged to persecute Protestants by the Spanish. As Linda Porter has shown, “Philip’s political advisers, and especially Simon Renard [the Imperial ambassador] took the view that encouraging martyrdom was likely to be a mistake.”40 The Queen’s Sorrow does go some way toward challenging the view that Spanish people are characteristically intolerant by focalizing the action through Rafael, a Spanish sundial-maker. Rafael is disturbed by the escalating violence against Protestants. He falls in love with an English woman, Cecily, and comes to reflect that, “these ‘heretics’ of hers were people, just people.”41 Spanish people, then, are just as capable of mercy and tolerance as the English. It is significant that Rafael is the only person to understand Mary

37 Suzannah Dunn, The Queen’s Sorrow (London: HarperCollins, 2009), 9. 38 Dunn, The Queen’s Sorrow, 122. 39 Dunn, The Queen’s Sorrow, 224. 40 Porter, Mary Tudor: The First Queen, 358. 41 Dunn, The Queen’s Sorrow, 244.

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as English, too; when he first meets her, he notes that she “was so Englishlooking; fireside-dry skin, ashen but flushed, as if it were scalded.”42 The English might understand Mary as a woman who has chosen Spain over England, but to a Spaniard, she is fundamentally English. However, it is Rafael’s assumption of Mary’s inner goodness that proves to be his downfall. When he discovers that Cecily is secretly married to a priest, and that her small son is therefore separated from his father, he decides to plead their case to Mary herself, assuming that she will be moved by this story of parental alienation. He is later horrified to discover that Cecily has been taken away for questioning, and later discovers her son, Nicholas, crying desperately on the street, alone.43 While what actually happens is left ambiguous, the novel implies that Rafael’s disclosure of their beliefs to Mary has led to the execution of Cecily and her husband. Far from the tolerant and kindly woman Rafael has assumed, Mary is in fact a monster, a woman capable of hearing a story of familial trauma and callously deciding to inflict even more suffering upon that family. All Rafael’s faith in Mary has been misplaced, and he leaves England in a state of complete despair. The novel, then, never really resolves its England versus Spain dilemma; is Mary violent and cruel because she is Spanish or because she is English? Dunn’s choice of narrator shapes the novel’s focus on the Anglo-Spanish dynamic, as the novel, rather unusually, represents Mary through the eyes of a Spanish man. The belief that Mary’s cruelty toward Protestants was a direct result of her Spanish marriage is challenged in Julianne Lee’s Her Mother’s Daughter (2009). While the novel largely aligns with other representations of Mary as a fundamentally pitiable woman, Lee goes to some length to demonstrate that Mary’s husband and his Spanish allies have advised Mary against the persecution of heretics. As I have shown, this novel opens with a reference to the “Bloody Mary” ritual, and so must account for Mary’s reputation as “bloody.” Instead, it is Mary who is singleminded in her determination to rid England of Protestantism, largely because of her emotional alignment to her Catholic mother. When Philip

42 Dunn, The Queen’s Sorrow, 29. 43 Dunn, The Queen’s Sorrow, 282.

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points out that burning Protestants might make already existing hostilities toward the Spanish rather worse, Mary objects: “Mary saw no logic and rather resented the idea that such evil could be better tolerated in her country than on the Continent.”44 Lee is almost certainly trying to make Mary a more agentic figure than other novels, in which Mary is wholly dominated by her husband, but in doing so she also reinforces the belief that Mary was a cruel religious fanatic, entirely deserving of the epithet of “Bloody.” Some novels take on a more light-hearted approach to the Bloody Mary myth. Terry Deary’s children’s book, The Maid, the Witch and the Cruel Queen (2016) turns on Mary’s notorious reputation as a bloodthirsty religious fanatic. The demands of genre are relevant here: Deary is writing a novel for children, and so uses comic exaggeration and elements of the grotesque and ridiculous. When Mary pays a visit to the town of Bewcastle, Lord Scuggate, the lord of the manor, decides to burn the local “witch” to please Mary; the assumption is that “Queen Mary likes to see her sort burned.”45 However, when Mary finds out that they have tried to persecute Old Nan, she is displeased. It is not Mary who likes to burn people: “Her Majesty’s judges may send some evil men to be burned. But Her Majesty does not like to do it.”46 The novel is undoubtedly comedic—Deary is the author of the bestselling Horrible Histories series—but underneath this slender tale lies an essential truth: Mary’s reputation as a monster is so pervasive that it is simply assumed by the populace that she would enjoy the spectacle of a woman being burnt at the stake. She is, after all, the “cruel queen” of the title. Deary also performs a familiar rhetorical maneuver in transferring agency for the burnings from Mary to her advisers, suggesting that she was just a passive tool of more powerful men. Interestingly, Deary conflates Mary’s persecution of Protestant heretics with the early modern witch trials in the afterword: “70 years after Queen Mary died,” he notes, “there were still witch trials all over the country.”47 The scrambling of historical fact, which allows for the introduction of both the figure of Mary I and the

44 Lee, Her Mother’s Daughter: A Novel of Mary Tudor, 262. 45 Terry Deary, The Maid, The Witch and the Cruel Queen (London: Bloomsbury,

2016), 18. 46 Deary, The Maid, The Witch and the Cruel Queen, 33. 47 Deary, The Maid, The Witch and the Cruel Queen, 61.

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early modern witch trials, here has the effect of reiterating the sense that Mary was eager to persecute a wide range of people, despite the novel’s attempt to deflect blame from Mary herself.

Mary v Elizabeth The persistent tendency in writing about Mary I is to compare her unfavorably to her sister Elizabeth. Implicit in these comparisons is the belief that Elizabeth was the successful monarch, able to do what Mary was not—entrench religious change and retain the love of her people, for example. Elizabeth is an ominous shadow in almost all fictions about Mary. Carolyn Meyer’s Young Adult novel Mary, Bloody Mary (1999), for instance, concludes with Mary looking into the future and declaring that “my sister would become my nightmare, my enemy.”48 The first glimpse that we are given of Mary in Suzannah Dunn’s The Testimony of Alys Twist (2020) is an extended and rather unpleasant diatribe by Mary about Elizabeth: “she makes my flesh creep,” Mary admits, before proclaiming that, “I don’t know how anyone can believe there’s anything of the king in her.”49 Mary’s jealous “carping” inspires compassion for Elizabeth in the novel’s eponymous focalizer.50 Maureen Peters’ Mary, The Infamous Queen (1968) foregrounds the difference between Mary and Elizabeth by contrasting the two sisters’ reactions to the death of Henry. While Mary wants to have one final meeting with her father, Elizabeth comments “hopefully” that “perhaps the King will die before we have time to see him.”51 Even the front cover of the 1971 Fontana Books edition is designed to draw a comparison between the sisters: while Mary is pictured looking stern and rather matronly, draped in rosaries and crosses, a fresh-faced young Elizabeth— whose dress exposes more skin—flirts with her sister’s husband in the background. Indeed, the young and lustful Philip is far more taken with the beautiful young Elizabeth than his aging, increasingly melancholy wife. While Mary burns heretics and earns the enmity of her people, Elizabeth is more interested in the mortal realm and is popular and

48 Carolyn Meyer, Mary, Bloody Mary (London: HarperCollins, 2003), 234. 49 Suzannah Dunn, The Testimony of Alys Twist (London: Little, Brown, 2020), 29. 50 Dunn, 31. 51 Maureen Peters, Mary, The Infamous Queen (London: Fontana Books, 1971), 5.

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pragmatic. By the end of the novel, Elizabeth is poised to improve upon the “poor inheritance” of a kingdom that she has been left by Mary.52 Emily Purdy’s Mary and Elizabeth (2011) is perhaps the best example of the tendency to define Mary by negative exemplar to Elizabeth I. The novel switches between Mary and Elizabeth’s first-person narration, a technique that enables Purdy to make direct comparisons between the two women. As Jenna Elizabeth Barlow writes, “Mary’s character is a consummate foil to Elizabeth’s; she is feeble in both mind and body, fanatically religious, naïve to a fault, haplessly needy and, by the novel’s close, suffering from severe mental instability.”53 The opening chapter is a long explication of Mary’s sense of grievance over the wrongs she sees as being done to her over her life, but while the reader is invited to feel a certain degree of sympathy, it cannot be said that Mary is portrayed in a particularly appealing manner. She calls Katherine Howard a “wanton guttersnipe,” describes herself as having a “pinch, sunken expression,” and vows at her father’s deathbed to “right the wrongs Father had wrought at The Great Whore’s instigation.”54 The opening chapter of Elizabeth’s narration is far more calculated to appeal; the message that Elizabeth takes from her mother’s fate is her declaration that “I would have no earthly master force his will upon me.”55 Where Elizabeth is strong and determined—the ideal protagonist for a twenty-first-century historical novel—Mary is desperate and vengeful. Much of the section of the novel that focuses on Elizabeth concerns her awakening sexual desire for Thomas Seymour. After that desire is consummated, however, Elizabeth rejects the powerlessness of female sexual desire. As Barlow notes, “Elizabeth’s traumatic sexual awakening, and her accompanying belief that sex and desire render women powerless, prompts her to recommit to her decision against any further romantic involvement with men.”56 The second half of the novel then turns to an exploration of Mary’s sexual awakening in her marriage to Philip.

52 Peters, Mary, The Infamous Queen, 188. 53 Jenna Elizabeth Barlow, “Women’s Historical Fiction ‘After’ Feminism: Discur-

sive Reconstructions of the Tudors in Contemporary Literature,” PhD Dissertation, (Stellenbosch University, 2014), 229. 54 Emily Purdy, Mary and Elizabeth (London: HarperCollins, 2011), 14, 24. 55 Purdy, Mary and Elizabeth, 33. 56 Barlow, “Women’s Historical Fiction,” 226.

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While Elizabeth learns from her experience of Thomas Seymour to regulate her desires and to weaponize her sexuality for her own gain, Mary is completely undone by her sexual desire for Philip. Mary becomes immediately sexually obsessed with Philip, and does not have the capacity to realize that her husband is completely uninterested in her.57 Mary’s happiness in her marriage is represented as a wilful delusion, and her sexual frustration leads to her increasing religious fanaticism. She soon loses the love of the people; “the virgin queen named Mary was actually the Antichrist in disguise.”58 By the end of the novel, the reader is positioned to agree with Elizabeth’s disgust over Mary’s behavior toward Philip: “I turned away then, sickened and saddened, to see my sister, the Queen of England, debasing herself so before this most unworthy and callous man who cared nothing at all for her.”59 Mary’s courtiers, meanwhile, take great pleasure in making fun of the gap between Mary’s regard for her husband and his philandering. Moderating and weaponizing her sexuality allows Elizabeth to be a great queen. Mary’s total failure to do the same leads to her undoing. The distinction between Elizabeth’s successful management of her sexuality, and Mary’s failure to do so, reflects the discourse of postfeminism. Postfeminism is an ideology that posits that feminism has made significant gains in achieving equality for women, and that, therefore, the success or failure of any woman is a result of her own choices. Rosalind Gill has usefully defined the elements of postfeminism: “[t]he notion that femininity is a bodily property; the shift from objectification to subjectification; an emphasis upon self-surveillance, monitoring and self-discipline; a focus on individualism, choice and empowerment.”60 Postfeminist texts often demonstrate a superficial commitment to feminism, while in fact reinscribing stereotypes deeply antithetical to feminism. Mary and Elizabeth, for instance, celebrates Elizabeth’s strength while simultaneously reiterating all the most negative stereotypes about Mary that have existed for centuries. Elizabeth is the postfeminist success story because she learns how to consciously subjectify herself, exercise discipline over her sexual

57 Purdy, Mary and Elizabeth, 304–5. 58 Purdy, Mary and Elizabeth, 319. 59 Purdy, Mary and Elizabeth, 353. 60 Rosalind Gill, “Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a Sensibility,” European Journal of Women’s Studies 10, no. 2 (2007): 147–66.

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urges, and makes the “right” choices. Mary, however, is a failure because she debases herself to her husband, fails to regulate her sexual desires, and turns her frustrations into religious violence; she makes all the wrong choices, in other words. On her deathbed, Mary acknowledges that her reign has been a total failure: I had lost. Everything I had aspired to, all my hopes and dreams, had been reduced to ashes, and I had lit the fires that rendered them thus. And Elizabeth was the phoenix who would rise from those ashes…My court was abandoning me, a dying and deluded woman. They were leaving me to die alone and running pell-mell towards the future and the flame-haired beacon of hope – Elizabeth.61

No part of Mary’s life is represented as successful. She had an unhappy childhood, her Counter-Reformation fails completely, and she will be known as Bloody Mary, rather than as “Merciful Mary,” as she had hoped.62 While Purdy does initially go some way toward framing Mary’s behavior as a result of her father’s marital travails, she ultimately blames Mary for her own failures as monarch and woman. It is only in Patricia Peakes’s Queen’s Lady (1981) that the comparisons between Mary and Elizabeth are represented in a manner that favors Mary. The novel’s focalizer, Magdalen Dean, consistently stresses the fact that Mary is open, honest, and transparent, while Elizabeth is crafty and manipulative. While Mary wins the support and love of the people, Magdalen reflects that, “it did not seem possible that the hawkeyed Princess could inspire anyone with devotion.”63 However, by the end of the novel the emotional Mary has been worn down by perpetual disappointment, and her life’s work goes unfulfilled. While Peakes does not represent Elizabeth’s reign at any great length, the novel positions her as the victor because she will overturn Mary’s incomplete CounterReformation. Even when Mary is the more attractive figure as a person, she is still the failed monarch, again reflecting the persistence of the conviction in historical fiction that Elizabeth “corrects” all of Mary’s “mistakes.”

61 Purdy, Mary and Elizabeth, 370. 62 Purdy, Mary and Elizabeth, 193. 63 Patricia Peakes, Queen’s Lady (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1981), 92–93.

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Beyond Bloody Mary What is striking about historical fiction about Mary Tudor is that it does not reflect significant shifts in the way that Mary’s reign has been assessed by historians. As Sarah Duncan has argued, “the new image of Mary that is emerging is that of an intelligent, capable, politically skilful queen who, far from being a failure and an aberration in comparison with her father Henry VIII or her younger sister Elizabeth I, was successful in more ways that have traditionally been attributed to her.”64 Recent biographies and critical reassessments have stressed the way that Mary’s reign actually paved the way for Elizabeth. However, not one historical novel about Mary represents her as anything close to a successful or competent monarch. In the epilogue to the most recent novel about Mary, The Testimony of Alys Twist , Suzannah Dunn expresses some surprise that Mary’s reign has not been represented more frequently, but not because it was a successful one. Instead, Dunn comments that, “it has always baffled me that Mary’s catastrophic five-year reign and her relentless persecution of the half-sister who then became Elizabeth I has barely stirred the public imagination.”65 Dunn characterizes Mary’s reign as a period in which “England was suspended” because “all anyone could do, in the end, was wait for Mary Tudor to die.”66 Dunn’s representation is a view of Mary’s reign radically out of step with the most recent historiography, but it is one that still dominates the pages of historical fiction. Historical fiction’s status as a popular form, written for and marketed to consumers of other historical fictions, is important to consider here. That Mary was the “failed” queen, especially in comparison to her younger sister, has taken on the status of accepted fact in historical fiction, and so novelists consistently reiterate that belief, even when they attempt to treat Mary sympathetically. There is a singular example of a feminist vision of the life and reign of Mary I, however: the play Mother’s Daughter, by Kate Hennig, which was first produced by the Studio Theatre in Stratford, Ontario, in June 2019. Mother’s Daughter is the third of a trilogy of plays about Tudor queens by Hennig, with The Last Wife, focusing on Katherine Parr, and The Virgin Trial , about the young Elizabeth’s entanglement with Thomas Seymour, 64 Sarah Duncan, “‘Bloody’ Mary?” 176. 65 Dunn, The Testimony of Alys Twist , 275–76. 66 Dunn, The Testimony of Alys Twist , 276.

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preceding Mother’s Daughter. All three plays present their central characters as strong, admirable women whose lives and stories have direct relevance to the present. In the playwright’s notes, Hennig explicitly writes about her admiration for Mary, saying she has “balls,” and that “in helping Mary to appear, I want the word ‘bloody’ to disappear.”67 The play uses a consciously modern, anachronistic style that sharply differentiates the play from most historical fiction, which is far more conservative in its approach to representing the past: Mary remarks that she needs to “get the hell out of dodge” when she discovers her brother has disinherited her, for instance.68 Hennig’s Mary has a difficult relationship with her mother, is not quite convinced in the rightness of persecuting people for their religious beliefs, and is rather surprised by her successful defense of the throne. When her mother, appearing to her as a ghost, tells her to restore the religious schism, Mary’s response is, “I can’t. Seriously. I can’t put those pieces back together. That’s asking too much of anyone.”69 While there are some nods toward her difficult youth, this Mary is intelligent, witty, and cautious, hardly the cruel religious obsessive or a tragic, pathetic figure. The stark differences between Hennig’s characterization of Mary and the tropes that have become the mainstay of historical fiction is perhaps a reflection of the greater possibilities afforded by the historical drama, as opposed to the historical novel. The popular historical novel is a highly schematized form, with set generic expectations around the use of language, style, realism, level of historical accuracy, and what Jerome de Groot calls “a seriousness of tone.”70 The historical novel should both stress the explicability of the past in terms of emotion and affect, but also represent the past as remote, glamourous, and inherently distinct to the present. These expectations do not exist in the same way for the historical drama, which has the capacity to be far more experimental in tone and form to suit the demands of the stage. Historical novels usually take up the subject of Mary’s life from its beginning until its end, while Hennig has the freedom to choose a more unstructured, less linear approach to 67 Kate Hennig, Mother’s Daughter (Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2019), xiii, original emphasis. 68 Hennig, Mother’s Daughter, 7. 69 Hennig, Mother’s Daughter, 19. 70 Jerome de Groot, Remaking History: The Past in Contemporary Historical Fictions

(Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 3.

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the material. The use of anachronism also aligns Hennig’s play to the recent anachronistic turn in historical television and film. Apple TV+’s recent series Dickinson (about the young Emily Dickinson) and Hulu’s The Great (about the life of Catherine the Great) similarly use anachronistic language in order to draw direct parallels between their historic subject matter and the present, as well as to present the lives of historical women as having a direct applicability to contemporary audiences. Mother’s Daughter, for instance, features a small wry nod to Brexit; when Mary is considering a European marriage, one of her ladies points out that “the English don’t trust Europeans.”71 Hennig’s play also most closely resembles what Katherine Harris has defined as the neo-historical aesthetic: “The visibility of anachronism within the ‘neo-historical aesthetic’ makes very clear that neo-historical narratives are fictionalized accounts of the past, openly influenced by their present moment of writing: this enables the texts to be their most honest, authentic selves.”72 Hennig’s play is the only instance of that neo-historical aesthetic playing itself out in fictions about Mary Tudor, and so it can far more self-consciously create a feminist Mary I for a twenty-first-century audience. In one of the play’s final scenes, Mary gives a speech that functions as the play’s feminist manifesto: “There have been women before me, and there will be women after me; women who don’t shrink from the sight of blood; women who argue; women who kill. Women who cling to what they believe, right or wrong. For years, if that’s what it takes. Till death, if that’s what it takes. My mother did that. I am my mother’s daughter.”73 The play thus establishes a feminist genealogy that links all the queens in the text itself but extends forward to encompass women in the future. That is not to say, however, that Hennig entirely does away with some of the standard tropes of writing about Mary. The contrast between Mary and Elizabeth is made clear by the character descriptions that Hennig gives: Mary is described as “private, cutting, wounded, capable, loyal; water,” while Elizabeth is “intelligent, precocious, entitled, unedited, sexual; fire.”74 What is interesting is that the distinction between fire and 71 Hennig, Mother’s Daughter, 44. 72 Katharine Harris, “‘Part of the Project of That Book Was Not to Be Authentic’:

Neo-Historical Authenticity and Its Anachronisms in Contemporary Historical Fiction,” Rethinking History 21, no. 2 (2017): 197 (193–212). 73 Hennig, Mother’s Daughter, 103. 74 Hennig, Mother’s Daughter, 2.

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water is essentially the opposite to the way that Mary and Elizabeth are often portrayed; usually Mary is envisaged as the sister who has extreme emotional highs and lows, while Elizabeth’s success is tied to her ability to manage and regulate her emotions, especially her sexuality, as she is able to do in Mary and Elizabeth. In any event, by the end of Mother’s Daughter, the sisters’ conflict comes to an end. They meet at their own tombs in Westminster Abbey to compare their posthumous reputation; Mary is annoyed that “Mary Stuart gets an even bigger tribute right over there, but me? Lost. Buried. Forgotten.”75 Mary takes specific offense to the word bloody, and the sisters decide that their reputations are both in need of renewal: “sisters in hope of restoration.”76 Against the spectacle of the traditional view of Mary as the failed and Elizabeth the successful queen, Hennig gives us two equally competent sister-queens—she is quite deliberately deploying standard tropes of writing about both Mary and Elizabeth in order to critically deconstruct them. In fact, Elizabeth spends much of this ghostly meeting reassuring Mary of her sincere regard for her. Mother’s Daughter is thus the only fictional representation of Mary to date to represent her as a successful monarch, and equally as admirable as her younger half-sister. Hennig’s play thus ends where Anna Whitelock’s (2009) revisionist biography of Mary begins: “[in burying Elizabeth in Mary’s tomb] James shapes how these queens were to be remembered; Elizabeth magnificent, Mary, her body, as her memory, buried beneath. This book seeks to resurrect the remarkable story of Mary, the first Queen of England.”77 While Hilda Lewis or Jean Plaidy, for instance, did not have access to these revisionist accounts of Mary’s reign, more recent historical novelists wrote in the wake of significant shifts in assessments of Mary’s reign. It is perhaps somewhat surprising that a feminist Mary Tudor has yet to emerge from the pages of the historical novel, given Mary’s status as the first queen-regnant of England, and the enthusiasm with which Elizabeth has been taken up as a proto-feminist icon in such novels. While Hennig’s play is a welcome development, it is a comparatively little-known text and, as such, cannot be said to have the power to inform Mary’s posthumous reputation as comprehensively as a popular historical novel could achieve.

75 Hennig, Mother’s Daughter, 106. 76 Hennig, Mother’s Daughter, 108. 77 Whitelock, Mary Tudor: England’s First Queen, 1.

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As Judith M. Richards has written, “Mary was an important paradigmbreaker, who set a number of important precedents for the next — and much more long-lived — queen regnant to follow.”78 It is to be hoped that Mary I, the paradigm-breaker, will someday emerge in the pages of the historical novel.

References Primary Sources Deary, Terry. The Maid, The Witch and the Cruel Queen. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. Dunn, Suzannah. The Queen’s Sorrow. London: HarperCollins, 2009. ———. The Testimony of Alys Twist. London: Little, Brown, 2020. Gregory, Philippa. The Queen’s Fool. London: HarperCollins, 2011. Hennig, Kate. Mother’s Daughter. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2019. Lee, Julianne. Her Mother’s Daughter: A Novel of Mary Tudor. New York: Berkley Books, 2009. Lewis, Hilda. Bloody Mary. London: Arrow Books, 1975. ———. I Am Mary Tudor. London: Arrow Books, 1971. ———. Mary the Queen. London: Arrow Books, 1975. Meyer, Carolyn. Mary, Bloody Mary. London: HarperCollins, 2003. Peakes, Patricia. Queen’s Lady. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1981. Peters, Maureen. Mary, The Infamous Queen. London: Fontana Books, 1971. Plaidy, Jean. In the Shadow of The Crown. New York: Three Rivers Press, 1989. Purdy, Emily. Mary and Elizabeth. London: HarperCollins, 2011. Stevens, Anne. Bloody Mary: A Tale of Tudor Revenge. Kindle edition. TightCircle Publications, 2019.

Secondary Sources Barlow, Jenna Elizabeth. “Women’s Historical Fiction ‘After’ Feminism: Discursive Reconstructions of the Tudors in Contemporary Literature.” Stellenbosch University, 2014. Doran, Susan, and Thomas S. Freeman. “Introduction.” In Mary Tudor: Old and New Perspectives, edited by Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman, 1–17. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

78 Judith M. Richards, “Reassessing Mary Tudor: Some Concluding Points,” in Mary Tudor: Old and New Perspectives, ed. Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 224 (206–24).

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Duncan, Sarah. “‘Bloody’ Mary? Changing Perceptions of England’s First Ruling Queen.” In The Name of a Queen: William Fleetwood’s Itinerarium de Windsor, edited by Charles Beem and Dennis Moore, 175–91. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Dundes, Alan. “Bloody Mary in the Mirror: A Ritual Reflection of Pre-Pubescent Anxiety.” Western Folklore 57, no. 2/3 (1998): 119–35. Freeman, Thomas S. “Inventing Bloody Mary: Perceptions of Mary Tudor from the Restoration to the Twentieth Century.” In Mary Tudor: Old and New Perspectives, edited by Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman, 78–99. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Gill, Rosalind. “Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a Sensibility.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 10, no. 2 (2007): 147–66. Groot, Jerome de. Remaking History: The Past in Contemporary Historical Fictions. Abingdon: Routledge, 2016. Harris, Katharine. “‘Part of the Project of That Book Was Not to Be Authentic’: Neo-Historical Authenticity and Its Anachronisms in Contemporary Historical Fiction.” Rethinking History 21, no. 2 (2017): 193–212. Light, Alison. “‘Young Bess’: Historical Novels and Growing Up.” Feminist Review 33 (1989): 57–71. Novak, Julia. “Nell Gwyn in Contemporary Romance Novels: Biography and the Dictates of ‘Genre Literature.’” Contemporary Women’s Writing 8, no. 3 (2014): 373–90. Porter, Linda. Mary Tudor: The First Queen. London: Piatkus, 2007. Prescott, H.F.M. Mary Tudor: The Spanish Tudor. London: Phoenix, 2012. Richards, Judith M. “Defaming and Defining ‘Bloody Mary’ in NineteenthCentury England.” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 90, no. 1 (2014): 287–303. ———. “Reassessing Mary Tudor: Some Concluding Points.” In Mary Tudor: Old and New Perspectives, edited by Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman, 206–24. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Russo, Stephanie. The Afterlife of Anne Boleyn: Representations of Anne Boleyn in Fiction and on the Screen. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Strickland, Agnes. Lives of the Queens of England, from the Normal Conquest, Vol. V . London: Henry Colburn, 1845. Wallace, Diana. The Woman’s Historical Novel: British Women Writers, 1900-2000. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Whitelock, Anna. Mary Tudor: England’s First Queen. London: Bloomsbury, 2009.

Index

A Actes and Monuments , 88, 181, 213, 220 “Book of Martyrs”, 220 Act of Supremacy, 27, 30, 51, 147 Adashev, Alexei, 208 Amadís de Gaula, 95, 101, 122 Amalric, Matthieu, 50 Amer, Nicholas, 40, 42 Anderson, Maxwell, 40, 41 Andrea, Alessandro, 95 Anne of Cleves, Queen of England, 45, 46, 103 Anne of the Thousand Days , 41 1948 play, 40 Anti-Marian propaganda, 152, 154 Ascham, Roger, 205, 211, 213 Aske, Robert, 48 Askew, Anne, 47 Atienza, Edward, 42 Authority, 2, 4, 5, 31, 50, 62, 70, 76, 77, 90–92, 95, 97, 98, 103, 105–108, 127, 175, 177, 182, 184

B Barton, Elizabeth, 51 Becoming Elizabeth, 54 Black Legend, 44, 47, 183, 204 Bloody Mary, 28, 47, 148, 152, 156, 158–160, 169–172, 177, 181, 183–185, 220, 221, 227, 229, 230, 234 folklore, 220 Bodenham, Sir Roger, 211 Boleyn, Anne, Queen of England, 3, 8, 13–16, 18, 19, 21, 22, 25, 30, 31, 35, 36, 40–42, 44, 46, 48–50, 53, 135, 146, 174, 176, 186, 187, 218, 223, 224 Boleyn, Thomas, 46 Bolger, Sarah, 44, 53 Bolt, Robert, 40, 41 Bonham Carter, Helena, 43 Boulogne, Siege of, 47 Brancaccio, Giulio Cesare, 92, 93, 98 Brereton, William, 47 Brexit, 237

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 V. Schutte and J. S. Hower (eds.), Writing Mary I, Queenship and Power, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95132-0

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INDEX

Bring Up the Bodies , 37, 50, 51, 198, 199 Brophy, Anthony, 44, 53 Bryan, Francis, 45 Bryans, John, 42 Bujold, Genevieve, 41 Burton, Richard, 41 C Cabot, Sebastian, 207 Carlos, Rey Emperador, 155–157, 159, 160 Catherine de Medici, 38 Catherine of Aragon, Queen of England, 11, 21, 35, 41, 42, 44, 45, 48, 53, 104, 106, 117, 135, 176 Catholicism, 4, 7, 18, 21, 22, 39, 49, 65, 69, 73, 74, 82, 88, 91, 99, 100, 116, 124–126, 128–130, 134, 144, 147, 148, 158, 160, 170, 178, 181, 187 Catholic Monarchs, 135, 144–146 Cecil, William, 209 Chabot, Philippe, 47 Chancellor, Richard, 194, 206, 209, 211 Chapuys, Eustace, 3, 4, 11–31, 35–54, 174, 186 Charles II, King of England, 135, 184, 219 Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, 3, 12, 17–31, 35, 39, 45, 68, 71, 72, 77, 78, 80, 90, 92, 103, 104, 116, 117, 126, 144, 145, 147, 148, 156, 173, 174, 208, 211 Christina of Denmark, Duchess of Lorraine, 211 Clement VII, 18, 77 Cromwell, Thomas, 24, 28, 29, 45–54, 135 Crosbie, Annette, 42

Crutchley, Rosalie, 42 Cuka, Frances, 42 D Deary, Terry, 230 The Maid, the Witch, and the Cruel Queen, 230 de Castro, Alfonso, 94, 204 Dee, John, 209, 211 de Medina, Pedro, 206 de Miranda, Bartolomé Carranza, 94, 100 de Ocampo, Florián, 150 Noticias de varios sucesos acaecidos , 106, 150 de Silva, Ruy Gomez, 92, 97, 101, 102, 150, 151, 204, 211 de Villena, Pedro Pacheco, 98 Dignam, Basil, 42 Diplomacy, 2, 4, 35, 62–65, 68, 72, 84 Dobtcheff, Vernon, 41 Don Luis of Portugal, 45 Dormer, Natalie, 44, 48, 53 Dorothy Dunnett Society, 207, 216 Douglas, Margaret, Countess of Lennox, 194, 213 Dudley, Guildford, 43, 182 Dudley, John, Duke of Northumberland, 90 Dunn, Suzannah, 228, 229, 231 The Queen’s Sorrow, 227–229 The Testimony of Alys Twist , 231, 235 E Eden, Richard, 206, 207 Edward IV, King of England, 184 Edward VI, King of England, 36, 65, 67, 93, 177 Elder, John, 200, 205, 206

INDEX

Elizabeth (1998), 6, 37, 167 Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007), 37, 40, 43, 186 Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 2, 3, 8, 36, 129, 143, 144, 153, 154, 167, 171, 217, 218, 232, 235 as princess, 4 in fiction, xiv Elizabeth I the Virgin Queen, 37, 40, 43 Elizabeth R (1971), 37, 40, 42 El Ministerio del Tiempo, 151, 157, 160 Elwes, Cary, 43 English women, 69, 70, 102 Erasmus, Desiderius, 13, 46, 209 F Feminism, 233 Field of the Cloth of Gold, 45 Fisher, John, Bishop of Rochester, 21, 22, 26 Foxe, John, 37, 88, 152, 181, 213, 220 Foy, Claire, 50 France, 4, 23, 27, 42, 47, 50, 65, 67, 71–73, 77, 78, 80, 91, 93, 94, 101, 104, 120, 136, 144, 148, 156, 176, 201, 212 Francis the Dauphin, 27, 45 Frazer, Alison, 42 G Game of Thrones , 53 Gardiner, Stephen, 42, 47, 50, 98, 211 Garrard, Sir William, 211 Geminus, Thomas, 105, 106 Gender, 20, 38, 49, 68, 90, 192, 193, 216, 225, 227 Greenlaw, Verina, 42

243

Gregory, Philippa, 226 The Queen’s Fool , 226 Grey, Lady Jane, 20, 90, 127, 152, 178, 182, 184, 219 H Habsburg, 15, 62, 67, 73, 75–79, 81, 87, 91–93, 103, 107, 129, 144, 147, 204, 211 Hakluyt, Richard, 206, 211 Hanse, 193, 208, 209 Hennig, Kate Mother’s Daughter, 235–238 The Last Wife, 235 The Virgin’s Trial , 235 Henri, Duke of Orleans, 45 Henry, Fitzroy, 46, 51 Henry VIII 1911 film, 36 1979 television movie, 43 2003 miniseries, 37 Henry VIII and His Six Wives , 14, 36, 42 Henry VIII, King of England, 3, 8, 11, 13, 23, 24, 31, 35, 54, 63, 65, 77, 103, 116, 133, 134, 143–146, 153, 154, 156, 171, 176, 177, 184, 186, 206, 211, 235 Heston, Charlton, 40, 43 Hirst, Michael, 37, 43, 44, 47–49, 52–54 Historical fiction, 6, 7, 54, 191, 192, 195, 198, 201, 207, 212, 214–219, 221, 222, 225, 234–236 Historiography, 6, 12, 37, 38, 52, 87, 88, 90, 108, 146, 154, 160, 183, 185, 198, 200–205, 212, 215, 216, 235 Homem, Diogo, 105 Hoods (headwear), 173, 176, 177

244

INDEX

Hooper, John, Bishop of Gloucester, 204 Howard, Catherine, 46, 232 Howard, Thomas, Duke of Norfolk, 20

I Ibn-Fadlan, Ahmad, 207 Inquisition, 75, 93, 104, 107, 228 Isabella I, Queen of Castile, 143 Ivan the Terrible, 194, 204

J Jackson, Glenda, 42 James V, King of Scotland, 17 Jarrott, Charles, 41 Jewels, 70, 103, 172–174, 180 Juana La Loca, Queen of Spain, 205

K Kapur, Shekhar, 6, 37, 40, 43, 47, 167–170, 185, 186 Kennedy, Maria Doyle, 44, 53 Knox, John, 37, 152 Kosminsky, Peter, 37, 48, 50, 52–54

L Lady Jane, 37, 43 Lapotaire, Jane, 43 Latimer, Hugh, 43, 167 Laughton, Charles, 39, 40 Lee, Julianne, 230 Her Mother’s Daughter, 220, 229, 230 Lesser, Anton, 49 Lesser, Lily, 50 Lewis, Damian, 50 Lewis, Hilda Bloody Mary, 223

I Am Mary Tudor, 223, 225 Mary The Queen, 223 Lingard, John, 204 Long, Sarah, 42 Louis XIV, King of France, 184 Lymond, Francis, 191, 193, 194, 201–211

M Madden, John, 43 Man for All Seasons, A 1954 play, 40 1964 television, 37, 41 1966 film, 40, 41 1988 television, 37, 41, 43 Mantel, Hilary, 37, 48–50, 52–54, 196, 198, 199, 214 Marie of Guises, 38 Marillac, Charles de, 45, 47 Mary I, Queen of England as princess, 172 Bloody Mary, 6, 115, 152, 156, 169, 187, 218–220, 222 in fiction, 217, 219, 237 María la Sanguinaria, 152 María Tudor, 145 marriage to Philip II, 4, 130 marriage treaty, 92, 95 pregnancy, 81, 82, 158 queen consort of Spain, 145, 152 religion, 4 Mary of Hungary, 31 Mary, Queen of Scots 2018 film, 54 Mary, Queen of Scots, 3 Material culture, 195–197 McKeown, Bláthnaid, 44 Meyer, Carolyn Mary, Bloody Mary, 231 Meyers, Jonathan Rhys, 48, 53 Michell, Keith, 41

INDEX

Michiel, Giovanni, 68, 74, 76, 80–83 Mid-Tudor crisis, 38 Mirror and the Light, The, 37, 52 Missledon, Ursula, 45 Montague, Lee, 43 Mor, Antonis, 103 More, Margaret, 41 More, Thomas, 41, 42, 46–51, 107 Muñoz, Andrés, 98, 99, 108, 122, 123, 150 Viaje de Felipe II a Inglaterra, 97, 99, 151 Muscovy Company, 193, 194, 196, 206, 207, 209, 211

N Naples, 4, 5, 77, 87, 88, 90–95, 97–99, 101, 107, 108, 182 Nepeja, Osep, 194, 199, 209 Northam, Jeremy, 49, 53 Nunn, Trevor, 43

O O’Neill, Sam, 53

P Pagett, Nicola, 41 Papas, Irene, 41 Parr, Catherine, 13, 42, 45–47, 187, 235 Pastiche, 192, 197, 198, 215 Paul III, Pope, 47 Paul IV, Pope, 72, 94, 99, 101, 210 Peakes, Patricia Queen’s Lady, 234 Peters, Maureen Mary, the Infamous Queen, 231, 232 Petre, Sir William, 209

245

Philip II, King of Spain, 4, 7, 36, 39, 65, 68, 87, 116, 126, 129, 130, 143–145, 147, 159, 168, 194 Philip of Bavaria, 45 Phillips, Kate, 51 Pilgrimage of Grace, 48 Plaidy, Jean, 218, 225, 226, 238 In the Shadow of the Crown, 224–226 Pole, Margaret, Countess of Salisbury, 22 Pole, Reginald, Cardinal, 22, 73, 82, 83, 98, 100, 124, 131, 208 Postfeminism, 233 Prescott, Hilda, 38, 222–226 Mary Tudor: The Spanish Tudor, 222 Privy Council, 5, 24, 90, 95–97, 106, 107, 194, 205 Providentialism, 37, 38 Pryce, Jonathan, 50 Purdy, Emily, 234 Mary and Elizabeth, 232–234

Q Queen Mary Atlas, 105

R Rampling, Charlotte, 42 Reconciliation with Rome, 62, 73, 74, 81, 82 Redgrave, Vanessa, 40 Relazioni, 64, 66–68 Renard, Simon, 43, 78, 79, 81, 90–94, 96, 98, 228 Rich, Richard, 47 Ridley, Nicholas, Bishop of London, 43, 167 Rublev, Andrei, 207 Rylance, Mark, 50, 53

246

INDEX

S Sánchez Coello, Alonso, 104 Sanseverino, Ferrante, 93 Schmalkalden, League of, 45 Scofield, Paul, 40 Scotland, 67, 133, 148, 194, 212 Seymour, Jane, Queen of England, 42, 45, 51, 176 Seymours, 46 Seymour, Thomas, 45, 232, 233, 235 Shakespeare in Love, 43 Shoes, 102, 183, 184 Sidney, Sir Henry, 209, 211 Silverman, Ben, 48 Six Articles, 42, 149 Slater, Daphne, 42 Sommerville, Philippa, 194 Soranzo, Giacomo, 61, 62, 67–70, 73, 77–80 Spain, 1, 4–6, 36, 47, 64, 72, 77–80, 87, 90–92, 94, 98, 100–107, 116–120, 122–126, 128–133, 135, 136, 144, 145, 149, 154, 156–158, 160, 168, 170, 173, 183, 186, 193, 204, 205, 228, 229 Spanish media, 6, 144, 146–151, 153, 154, 158 Spanish Princess, The, 54 Stallybrass, Anne, 42 Stanhope, Anne, 45 Stevens, Anne, 227 Bloody Mary: A Tale of Tudor Revenge, 227 Strickland, Agnes and Elizabeth Lives of the Queens of England, 204, 221

Sturm, Johannes, 211 T The Other Boleyn Girl , 37, 43 The Private Life of Henry VIII , 39, 40 The Six Wives of Henry VIII , 36, 41, 42, 52 The Tudors (2007-10), 4, 8, 36, 37, 43, 44, 47, 49, 52–54, 186 The Twisted Tale of Bloody Mary, 36, 43 The Virgin Queen (2005), 185 Thomas, Adrienne, 41 Trade with England, 51 Tudor, Margaret, Queen of Scotland, 45 Tudor, Mary, Queen of France and Duchess of Suffolk, 5, 40, 87, 169, 172, 176, 178, 200, 223, 228, 235, 237, 238 U Udall, Nicholas, 209 V Venetian embassy, 4, 69, 79, 80 Venice, 4, 17, 62–65, 67, 71–76, 78–81, 83, 84 von Herberstein, Sigismund, 206 Vyshnevetsky, Dmytro, 194, 208 W Wernham, R.B., 200

INDEX

Whalley, Joanne, 51 Willan, T.S., 199, 211 Winstone, Ray, 43 Wolf Hall , 4, 37, 50, 52–54 2009 novel, 37 2015 miniseries, 36 Wolsey, Thomas, Cardinal, 77 Wyatt’s Rebellion, 43, 74, 78, 80, 182, 185

Y York, Susannah, 41 Young Adult fiction, 231

Z Zinnemann, Fred, 40

247