Tudor: The Family Story by Leanda de Lisle

Author:Leanda de Lisle [Lisle, Leanda de]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2013-08-28T23:00:00+00:00

30

REVOLT

QUEEN MARY SAT under her canopy of estate at Whitehall, a slight figure, with light-coloured eyes.1 Her cousin Margaret Douglas, and her half-sister Elizabeth, watched her from a gallery and enjoyed the music Mary had ordered for the feast. There were harps and choirboys to entertain the new Imperial ambassadors, who had just arrived that October 1553. People wondered if they had come to arrange a marriage for the queen. Aged thirty-seven, Mary had grown accustomed to spinsterhood and claimed she preferred the single life, but she would need to choose a husband, and soon, if she was to have children.

The popular choice of husband for Mary was a great-grandson of Edward IV called Edward Courtenay. Royal and English, he might have been the perfect candidate had he not been imprisoned in the Tower since 1538, the year his father, the Marquess of Exeter, had been executed by Henry VIII for his pro-papal loyalties. Courtenay had been only twelve then, and when he had emerged from the Tower in August, aged twenty-seven, he was a damaged man. Like Edward Plantagenet, Earl of Warwick, who had grown up in the Tower in the reign of Henry VII, Courtenay was childish and petulant. Mary did not appear at all interested in him as a husband, and so Courtenay began annoying Elizabeth instead, claiming there were ‘amourettes’ between them.2

What was not yet public knowledge was that Mary was already considering a marriage proposal she had received a few days earlier from Charles V’s son, her cousin Philip of Spain.3 Mary was concerned that her country was threatened by French ambitions, and while Courtenay was of ‘small power and authority’, she believed Philip would ‘be able from his own resources to prevent an enemy attack’.4 Before Mary would accept the proposal, however, she wanted Philip to agree that he would have no role in the government of her kingdom. This was an issue that the new ambassadors would have to grapple with, and indeed accept, before negotiations progressed. Meanwhile Mary was also considering who should succeed her if she proved unable to have children.

Mary confided to one of the Imperial ambassadors that she would not allow her current heir, Elizabeth, ‘to succeed [to the throne] because of her heretical opinions, illegitimacy and characteristics in which she resembled her mother’. Sitting in the gallery alongside Mary’s contemporary, Margaret Douglas, the twenty-year-old was a vision of shining youth, her hair the same corn gold as her late brother Edward’s, her long face, sallow skin and black eyes those of the mercurial, shamed, Anne Boleyn. Since Jane Grey’s imprisonment Elizabeth had become the new focus for the Protestant opposition and it was a role she seemed to flaunt. She continued to affect the plain dress she had worn during her brother’s reign, her servants were all Protestant, and Mary complained she ‘talked every day with heretics and lent an ear to all their evil designs’.5

Mary wanted to name Margaret Douglas as her heir in Elizabeth’s place, but she had been warned that overturning the Act of Succession would be extremely problematic.

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